I Am Happiest When [No.40]

Posted by Jill Chivers in Happy

I get inspiration from many sources. In a novel I’m reading now, one of the characters, a somewhat world-weary young man, comments to his more ambitious and worldly friend:

Quotation-Marks“We’ve lost our spiritual values.  People are happy to live in a moral and ethical void.  They’ve lost all sense of mystery and gratitude and wonder.

They talk about fulfilment when they mean self-gratificationThey talk about balance when they mean having it allThey talk about love when they mean control“.

I found that to be a very insightful commentary on modern life.  We do delude ourselves into thinking we are seeking balance – when what we want is to have everything we want.

We do confuse real love with being (or feeling) in control.

And we do distort the experience of true fulfilment with pleasing ourselves and responding to our desires and impulses (the very definition of self-gratification).

Balance often means prioritising and letting something go.

Love always means surrender, of one sort of another.

And fulfilment means loving what you have rather than continuing to pursue what you don’t.

Balance, love and fulfilment are part of what makes one’s life happy.

And in my journey into the landscape of happiness, which I’ve been exploring for the last 9 months (you can catch up on my musings here), learning what true balance, true love, and true happiness is has been one of the many lessons I have had to explore from scratch.  Putting aside everything we are told about balance, love and fulfilment, and discovering for myself balance, love and fulfilment – experienced and defined on my own terms.

I am happiest when (#40)

Everyone I love is healthy.  We say that, don’t we?  But we only really know what it means when someone we love is unwell and not healthy.  My dad had a heart attack this week, on Thursday.  A minor one, and one he is likely to recover from.  Apart from some adjustments to the things he is advised to do and not do, his life should continue to be an active and healthy one.  We hope.  But in the hour it took from the phone call from my mother to tell me he’d been taken to Emergency, as I was driving to the hospital and waiting to get word and to see him, I was frozen with fear.  I blanked everything out – I couldn’t take in even the possibility he may be already dead, or dying.  These kinds of experiences remind us all of how quickly it can all change, and how precious the time we have right now really is.

I spent some time here this week - not the happiest of places.

I spent some time here this week – not the happiest of places.

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