The Trick to Pursuing Happiness

People are very poor witnesses of themselves. Their testimonies are quickly false as they twist and turn for a better vantage point – without ever improving their sight.

^{Mark Daynes, Two Faces of the Buddha, from Unsplash}

People don’t care to love. They are more concerned with paying off their debt – which is also a necessity, but has nothing doing with the love that is to be made before man can claim his bid to humanity.

When the husband goes away to fulfil a position abroad and earn good money, and then returns five years later with a pot of gold, what is its net worth? He was too busy, too tired, too concerned about his financial affairs – all good and necessary in the maintenance of the mundane, profane and secular – too hard at work, even to call her and tell her he loved her. He never wrote; picked out a card, licked an envelope, composed a poem. Did he ever dream of her by his side in a blue lagoon? Did he sing to her while shaved and showered? Was he considerate of the love she needed to receive, or did he only donate on Sundays? Now he is tired and continues to work for his love in a poorly paid job. Soon he will die. What was the gain?

"But I did it all for you! I suffered for half a decade to bring you back this token of my love for you!"

In “The Captive Mind” (also available as audiobook) Czeslaw Milosz speaks of us as slaves to society and reminds us of the difference between the freedom from and the freedom in order to.

My own thoughts go: it is not that we must figure out what would be the highest goal to aspire as a free man, but rather to identify the wise man as free. As we grow older we wonder if we are wiser than our neighbour, as if there is a comparative scale of freedom. In freedom you have distinguished the freedom from and the freedom in order to, and you are free from necessity right where the two no longer meet.

I remind you all: happiness is a measure, not a pursuit in and of itself. Hence it cannot be bought or worked towards.

Enjoy. This is to be the best self you are and the path into love.

Weekend Reading Tip:

Read Simone Weil for more on truthful testimony of who one is before one is no longer who one thinks one is.