I've been thinking a lot about happiness lately. People seem obsessed with obtaining or attaining an everlasting state of happiness. If only I have that Lambo and money to rain on hooktenders I'll be happy or If only I have the exact shade of beige in the grain of my granite countertop then I'll be happy or If only that person over there was mine I'll be happy or If only those people were under my complete and total control we'll all be happy. You see where this is going.
The thing is, happiness and yearning are mutually exclusive states of being. When you are constantly yearning for things that you don't have all the time of course you aren't going to be happy, because you'll be adorned in malcontent pajamas. I am sure they have a lovely Grumpy Cat pattern on them, but really, perpetually wanting for the next best thing is going to harsh your mojo, even though I will admit that I now want a pair of Grumpy Cat pjs. Drat, brain training fail...
Moving on, this morning I was reading a bit of the Epictetus' Discourses and came across this little gem amongst the treasure trove of insights:
It is quite impossible to unite happiness with a yearning for what we don't have. Happiness has all that it wants, and resembling the well-fed, there shouldn't be hunger or thirst.
Epictetus, Discourses, 3.24.17
Hello! I'm not talking about banishing goals here, but honestly, if you find yourself always yearning toward the horizon with regards to your happiness, perhaps it's time to try an exercise of finding joy and contentment right in the moment.
Take this creature for instance:
He can't even be bothered to arrange his carcass fully on the place he takes his rest, yet he is fully happy in his situation. Note the almost out of this plane of existence satiated grin. Maybe I need to just flop down on the edge of a precipice and turn my mind off, one leg dangling into the abyss.
All this pontificating aside, today, if you find yourself yearning for something far off with the mindset that you'll attain happiness if you just get that thing, I challenge you to try rejoicing in just being happy in the moment instead. Even if your driveway is trying to kill the underbelly of your car, you have emotional trauma swirling around you in multiple forms, an unexpected ear infection caused you to leave work, you have to run thirty-two errands, your truck unexpectedly broke a U-joint, and that darn cat keeps slapping your plants off of the bathtub surround, it doesn't matter. All of those things just mean that you are gloriously, blissfully alive, and that's something to be happy about, isn't it?
And as most of the time, all of the images in this post were taken on the author's somewhat vexed but rarely perplexed iPhone.
