FURTHER THOUGHTS ON HAPPINESS

My most visited blog piece is one called ENTIRELY AND STUBBORNLY HAPPY.  We seem to all seek the state of happiness..  It is a journey that can be a fool’s errand if we believe that it exists outside of us as a place, an event, or a particular person.  Sometimes people seek therapy with the goal of being happy 100% of the time.   Mostly this is not the balanced quest of working on our attitudes and energies, but one of negating our other emotional experiences.  We don’t want to feel the sadness, loss, fear or anger, so we try and blot it out with a coat of cheeriness.  Of course this doesn’t work well, because these feelings lie just behind the paint job of emotion and continually bleed into our experience.  The best way to not feel so much of these harder emotions is to acknowledge them, experience them.  Only then are they free to move on.  But this is old news.  I have written a few times on this subject and I wanted to take it a bit further today.

 

I was watching an interview with the writer Margaret Atwood.  Charlie Rose asked her if she was happy.  She paused and then said. “You ask if I am happy, and happiness comes from doing something that interests you, so yes, I am happy”.   This statement took me in a number of directions.  In her case she was talking about her work as a writer.  It draws her interest.  She is pulled into the work by some innate or learned fascination with a process.  It made me think of all the people who don’t love their jobs.  Have you ever really taken stock of how many people do not find happiness in their work.  I mean I know work is work because we depend on the income from it to sustain our lives, and of course sometimes we all just want to go to the beach,  but beyond this many many people do not find their work of interest to them other than the financial gain.  This makes sense if you are new to the work world and don’t yet know what might really draw you in. But if you have gotten past thirty and have worked for 10 or 15 years and still have not honed in on a work path that brings you some happiness, it is perhaps time to sideline yourself for a moment and reconsider.  It is so easy to get caught in the treadmill of chasing money.  There is rarely joy down that road.  Where you need to look is in the direction of INTEREST.

As I heard her words about happiness and interest, I found myself drifting into a kind a meditation.  I could feel myself moving along a line that was making me feel happy.  So here I was interested in her words and as my interest increased, as I focused more on their meaning, I was , in  point of fact, happy.  Now  my unerstanding deepened.  I have previously said that happiness is a  choice.  It is not the sunset but our own inner permission and interpretation of such a thing that allows the rising of that sense of delight.  Now I can see that it is the allowing of our own curiosity about something that takes us there.  More simply said it is the INTEREST that we allow to come forward that propels unto into joy.   Thank you Margaret Atwood and Charlie Rose.  I needed that.

If our lives do not INTEREST us, then we cannot be happy.