I'm starting to believe that happiness is overrated.
What can we realistically expect from this life, anyway?
Why is so much importance placed on the myth of happiness?
So much angst and turmoil. I truly believe the thinking person should not have any lofty goal as elusive as perceived happiness.
Oh sure, we may THINK we are happy, for a time. Then the warm fuzzy fades and what are we left with? Reality.
I will say for myself that my lifelong search for happiness has shifted. Happiness is a fleeting emotion unsustainable for any definate period.
Contentment is solid. Contentment is something worth striving for. If my live remained rooted in the bedrock of contentment and comfort - I can deal with the ups and downs of what the world says Happiness Is...(a warm puppy?)
Why does everyone have to be HAPPY anyway? Who says? Happiness is for the ignorant.
My dog isn't happy unless he's chewing on one of my favorite slippers. I take it away...he finds it. I replace the shoe with his nyla-bone; he ignores it and skulks off to find that slipper again.
This is one warm puppy who is in constant search of happiness.
For decades now I've been TRYING to be HAPPY with myself. Lets face it. I'm 45 years old, been in therapy for 20 of them and I'm no closer to being happy with myself now than I was at the age of 25. Maybe I should just accept myself and move on? I think Franciscan Monks are right on. I'd probably be more content living as an ancress praying the angelus morning, noon and night. I'm surrounded by temptations chewing away at my true calling for what the world calls "unhappiness".
"This onehead is verily made when the mights of the soul are reformed by grace to the dignity and the state of the first condition; that is, when the mind is firmly established, without changing and wandering, in God and ghostly things, and when the reason is cleared from all worldly and fleshly beholdings, and from all bodily imaginations, figures, and fantasies of creatures, and is illumined by grace to behold God and ghostly things, and when the will and the affection is purified and cleansed from all fleshly, kindly, and worldly love, and is inflamed with burning love of the Holy Ghost."
2 comments:
I had the Franciscans in high school and they were a happy-go-lucky self-contained unit. Each man brought a skill to the order and if you needed an outlet fixed or your books balanced or someone to coach handball, odds were one of the brothers could do it. Many had lived lives on the outside before joining, in addition to a few who probably joined to beat the draft. Some were downright thuggish in their discipline of us boys. Still, it's been 35 years since I took the NY State Regents in Algebra and I think I could still pass it easily thanks to the lessons of Brother Victor, OSF.
They've got it down to a scienc. Check my post - Ryan's Toenail and my lifelong lesson on floor scrubbing from Sister Hortensia. I alway thought Franciscans were the coolest bunch. And, I like the idea that many joined to avoid the draft.
Right-on my brown cloaked brotha!
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