On Happiness

Old point here that began thoughts back in 1997 and which came actually from my friend who just got married… we used to share a laptop… me after midnight and he before so we used to read each others documents and add comments. He added to a discussion on Happiness the words “Eternal happiness is complacency”.

Thinking about a girl at the wedding who I have known for a long time and who is still single and is enormous fun and really would make a good partner I realised something about happiness. She would bring me happiness. But what “my muse” brought me was more than happiness it was something like “peace” (initially).

After recent discussions on peace it was obvious just walking onto this train now… happiness is there and next day it can be gone. I enjoyed the wedding but now the wedding has gone so is the happiness it “caused”. I enjoyed that girls company but now she is gone so has that happiness. We seek to hold tighter and tighter those things which cause us happiness because we don’t like the happiness going. But even holding something tight we find that the happiness gets stale and goes anyway.

Put like this Happiness really is a lowly pursuit.

Peace on the other hand is different. It is a bit like the hard work and planning that goes into an event. The better planned the easier it will occur. The same is true for whole lifetimes. Those with good planning (from past lifetimes) will find that things go very much smoother in this life.

But there is very much more because those who are peaceful can embrace difficulties in a way that is “matter of fact”. One may have enormously “bad luck” and find that everything goes wrong – but the peaceful person just tackles the situations as they arise and just give it their best shot. If they fail then there is a lesson to learn and also the simple acceptance of ones finite limits. It was the first day of rain yesterday in ages and the worst day of the bank holiday; not good for a wedding where everyone was supposed to walk to cut down on fuel consumption etc. It still happened however no problem.

So eternal Peace - unlike Happiness – is not complacency. But Peace can become like Happiness if we try to hold it close. “My Muse” gave me peace (at one level) because she promised (in my mind) to provide me with satisfaction. But realising that she was more interested in Happiness herself (i.e. a good time) I lost the Peace and sort the temporary fix of Happiness. When she died therefore and my fixes stopped it had the opposite effect and made me un-peaceful – it is that lack of peace which is my demons that I battled at the wedding – a feeling that I want to smash the whole thing up like a child in a tantrum.

But logically then Peace is an unconditioned “state of mind” (for want of a better noun cos there is no “thing” called peace), and being such nothing and no-one can actually cause it. Maybe “my muse” showed me Peace but I still have to find it and that quest has nothing to do with girls (except maybe the learning to live without them).