The pursuit’ of happiness, sounds as if we are hunting happiness in order to capture and hold it prisoner. If happiness ‘eludes’ or ‘escapes’ us, it’s because it wont be tied down or we don’t recognise it when it arrives. If we were eternally happy how would we know? Happiness could turn into a special state of hell. Knowing you’re happy is bound up with knowing you were unhappy. To take pleasure requires the dark shadow of pain to stand over it.
What makes us happy? A deep satisfaction in an achievement, in a person, situation or place that helps us feel fulfilled and content. Everything in our world seems suddenly to be alright. Happiness invariably arrives unannounced, further surprising and pleasing us because it did so unexpectedly.
Whether happy or unhappy we can become over-intoxicated with it, in the heights of our glee or the pit of our misery, this unbalances us. From a point of morbid despair ‘the pursuit of happiness’ can feel ridiculous. Unbounded happiness can become stifled by its own greed.
Mostly we’re just doing OK, and maybe that is, paradoxically, a much happier way of living your life, than endlessly pursuing the chimera of happiness.
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