Summer                                                                     Solstice Moon

A word about pursuing happiness.  Or meaning.  Yes, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.  I know.  Right there in the founding documents.  An ur-right.  One equivalent to survival and liberty.  Well, who wouldn’t be pleased to find happiness?  I doubt I would.

Now this may be because I have a northern European genetic predilection to dysthmia, could be.   And, in fact, I think that’s the case.  This is not, however, my point here.

Happiness doesn’t strike me as a desirable state, at least not for any length of time.  Why?  Because it has the flavor of arrival, of sufficiency, of finished, of done.  Happiness comes to the human life like the finish line model of retirement, once we get there that’s all we need. After that, we coast.  Play golf.  Smoke cigars.  Travel.  Watch TV.

No, I’ll go for a more Greek idea, eudaimonia.  Composed of two Greek worlds, eu (good) and daimon (spirit) Aristotle and the Stoics after him promoted it as the end of human life. As such it has often been translated as happiness or welfare, but perhaps a better phrase is human flourishing.  Or, without getting fancy, why not good spirit?  Both have an active turn, taking us toward enrichment, fullness, striving within a humane ambit.

Now there you have an internal state worth cultivating.  It’s the difference between a noun and a gerund.  Happiness vs. flourishing.  I would much rather flourish than be happy.  Much.