• Tag Archives happiness

  • Happiness is …

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    -1  bar falls 30.19  0mph  NW  windchill -1   Samhain

    Full Moon of Long Nights     Day 8hr 46m

    “Take anything and everything seriously except yourselves.” – Rudyard Kipling

    As I get ready for two tours today, Kipling strikes a note I need to hear more often.  With all the news about happy people spreading the love out three degrees of separation I wondered about those of us who go through life somewhere in the muddle.  Yes, muddle.

    Happiness comes to me only rarely, then for brief moments.  I’m not usually gloomy, but I’m not usually sunny either.  I come from a family with manic-depression, so a tendency toward the melancholy probably came with the helix.  Melancholy is an old friend, in fact, some of my best writing ideas and creative work comes when he pays a visit.

    In fact, I distrust happy people to some extent.  It always seems to me that they willfully ignore a large part of what goes on the world.  Spoken, I know, like a guy who takes himself and his world too seriously.

    I am one, I am many.  Whitman and I have our melancholy, but we also have our quiet joys, raucous moments, times of abandon.

    Well, this is a bit of a downer, but I’m gonna leave it in anyhow.  How I felt this morning.


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  • On Seeking Happiness

    Posted on by Charles Comment

     74  bar steady 29.94 ompn SE dew-point 62  sunrise 6:17  sunset  8:16  Lughnasa

    Full Corn Moon

    “Men who seek happiness are like drunkards who can never find their house but are sure that they have one.” – Voltaire

    In Los Angeles Story, Steve Martin has one of the great opening moments in cinema.  He drives into a planned community, tie undone and looking exhausted after a long work day.  In his hand the garage remote points at house after house, all the same, on and on and on, all gray, all with the same front porch, the same roofline, the same front yard and driveway.

    Contrary to the positive psychology movement I agree with Voltaire that happiness, if it comes, arrives in moments and as the adjunct of other activity, never as a realized objective.  Happiness as a pursuit has a futile, desparate air, intimating that life without it has less, is less.  I don’t believe that.  Think of Viktor Frankl, creater of logotherapy, who maintained a sense of purpose while in the concentration camps.  Or, Anne Frank, hidden, yet living.  Imagine those times in your life when happiness has eluded you, were those times less worthwhile than those when happiness came easily?

    To seek happiness demeans the reality and integrity of the total human experience.  If it comes, let it come.  If it does not, we live on anyway.

    Outside work today so I need to get going.  See you soon.


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