The search for happiness seems like such a big part of our lives, such a central focus of concern.
Am I happy? Am I happy enough? Am I going to be happy? Am I going to get more happy? Am I gonna lose my happiness? Sometimes it can seem like it’s an out-and-out struggle for happiness.
It’s a fight to try to get happiness, try to keep it, try to find it when it’s lost.
It seems like this is just sort of automatically set as sort of the centre focus for so many people.
But imagine what it would be like if you simply decided to forget about happiness.
What if you decided that it just doesn’t matter? What if it’s just not a concern, just indifference to happiness? Could be: think of it like the weather.
Happiness, feeling happy, is like a sunny day.
Sometimes it’s sunny and sometimes it’s not.
So should I focus on that? You know, am I putting energy into focusing on why isn’t it sunny enough, is it going to stay sunny, how can I make it more sunny? If it’s like the weather, this is just something that comes and goes, and something out of our control.
It’s not something that can be directly grabbed.
And that is an interesting idea.
I don’t know how far to take this, but I find this idea interesting.
Now, it’s not always good to make things passive and say, “Well, that’s out of our control.” It’s good to take active steps towards what we want, not just “Oh, if it comes, it comes, and if not, then whatever, that’s OK.” No.
But, there are some things that are in our control and some things that aren’t in our control.
So if we take something that is out of our control, and we try to treat it like it is something in our control, that seems to very easily lead to unhappiness, constant frustration, struggling against the flow of the universe, just like trying to force water upstream, pushing water up the river, just trying to resist something that is outside our control.
Now, when it comes to something like the weather, we can all basically agree.
Unless you are a weather wizard doing some kind of weather magic, or maybe you are developing some kind of weather control machines, but besides that, basically weather is something that is outside our control, and most people are quite willing to accept that.
And then, once you accept that weather is outside your control, well, “Oh, look.
It’s a sunny day.
Isn’t that nice?” “Oh, it’s a rainy and windy day.
That’s unpleasant.
Oh, but what are you gonna do?” Because it’s outside our control, we don’t need to spend any effort to try to do anything about it.
We can be more or less happy that “Oh, that’s nice”, “Oh, that’s too bad”, but otherwise, there’s nothing else to do about it.
[…]
Well, it seems like our feelings are somewhere in that category, somewhere in between.
They’re not totally under are control.
In a large degree, feelings are something that happen to us.
Even the root of a word like “passion”: it’s the same root as a word like “passive”.
Passion: this is something that happens to us.
We receive the feeling.
And yet, it seems so normal to think about pursuing happiness.
“The pursuit of happiness”: even that phrase itself, famous phrase.
So there seems to be something off about treating it like something in our control.
And it seems like it would be an interesting experiment to imagine: what would it be like if I simply treated my happiness just like the weather, and didn’t worry about trying to make it sunny, or trying to make the rain stop and make the wind calm down? Just accept whatever feelings come? And then my focus is- well, then, what do you do if you are not chasing after happiness? It seems like what you could do is simply- well, yeah, what would be your life then? What would be your life if you didn’t care about your emotions? That’s an interesting thought experiment.
If you were not concerned about being happy or sad, what would you do with your life? Well, it seems like possibly one thing to do would be doing what we believe is right, what we feel is the right thing to do.
Imagine making your choices throughout the day based on what you believe is the right thing to do, with no concern about whether you are having a happy, carefree day or a sad, heavy, and dismal day.
What if, either way, you simply do what you believe is right? And not just some pre-established rule that is handed down about what you are told is what you should do and the right thing to do, but actually what you personally believe.
What do you believe is the right thing to do, based on everything in your experience, in your life, and the way you see the world, the way you interpret things? What do you believe is the right thing to do? And then imagine just doing that.
What would life be like? I’d be curious to hear.