What is happiness, anyway? Does anybody know?
It’s definitely not a destination. It’s not a tranquil, sunlit realm at the top of the ladder you’ve spent your whole life hauling yourself up, rung by rung. It’s more like the thing that Christians call grace: you can’t earn it, you can’t strive for it, it’s not a reward for virtue.
It exists all right, it will be given to you, but it’s fluid, it’s evasive, it’s out of reach. It’s something you glimpse in the corner of your eye until one day you’re up to your neck in it. And before you’ve had time to take a big gasp and name it, it’s gone.
So I’m not going to spend what’s left of my life hanging round waiting for it. I’m going to settle for small, random stabs of extreme interestingness – moments of intense awareness of the things I’m about to lose, and of gladness that they exist. Things that remind me of other things. Tiny scenes. Words that people choose, their accidentally biblical turns of phrase.
Twenty minutes into a bout of gardening, when I notice I’m moving very slowly from task to task; when haste and impatience have left me.
That’s interesting because this is something I really do believe also. I connect with this definition.
That reminds me of The difference between Happiness and Meaning and how they are actually two different things. Knowing which one you are going for can help you have some clarity in your endeavors.
It’s similar because
It’s different because
It’s important because
Go one level up : Philosophy MOC You may also be interested in: Human Nature and The Happiness Lottery