all through annals happiness has been a centered and contentious theme,
as it adopts our whole being that forever aspires to it in numerous and
often at odds ways. After a quarter years of relentless enquiry, here
is what I have to say about it.
Having
said this, even this sort of joyfulness is a product of affirmative
conceiving and affirmative activity, with good fortune lending a
assisting hand. In short, it is a product of will in somewhat favorable
attenuating factors. But isn't it peculiar to suggest that happiness can
be of one sort or another? Are there not simply happiness and sadness? I
believe not. The sort of happiness that the sage converses about is
matching with misfortune. It is preeminently a doing from inside – while
without, the only prerequisite for it is that the sage be alive and
adept of thought. It is a feeling of serenity, of being at calm with his
position and his conscience, as a well-adjusted and completely pledged
domestic of life, of humanity, of God as he sees them.
However
attentive he is of the subjectiveness – i.e., the one-by-one limitations
and hence the imperfection – of his view, he does reside by it with
utmost faithfulness, if also with a enthusiasm to reevaluate it
critically when he catches himself out in a misstep. His wisdom is
eternally a work in advancement; it is always laced with some form of
foolishness, which leaves him open to mock. Humility and compassion,
plus wit are thus features that he cultivates. He mocks and forgives
himself, and overhead all strives to improve. He shows no complacency,
but an acceptance of his humanness that he is intent on conveying to the
largest possible degree of reality and nobility. And this dainty
combine of resignation and labour alone – in any situation, favorable or
not – is indeed the mystery of his joyfulness, which admittedly is a
dry kind of joy that loads up the mind rather than the heart.
It
follows that this joyfulness leaves certain thing to be desired:
happiness in the fullest sense of the phrase (a state of fulfillment,
when everything is going our way, in terms of results as well as
efforts), which is a joy, ever so sweet, that loads up both the mind and
the heart. When the sage experiences this supreme joyfulness, he
rightly feels blessed, and understands how precarious it is.
Furthermore, he acknowledges this precariousness, or the fact that pain
and ultimately death loom ahead. Only assaults are won in the war of
life that will inescapably – despite every valiant effort to prevail –
end in defeat.
Some will state that happiness in its so-called
fullest sense departs certain thing more to be yearned: the power to
make this joyfulness infinite: immeasurably large and unlimited in
length. Among them, some will choose the route of belief, which
supposedly directs to a heavenly afterlife, whereas some will choose the
route of cause, which admits of no rosy conviction based on wishful
conceiving and unbridled believe. This path directs nowhere as far as
the after is worried, or rather somewhere that is unknown – most likely
so different from what is renowned that it totally exceeds our
proficiency to conceive of its environment.
I count amidst these
proponents of cause, these infidels, to whom the only source of meaning
is not a paradisiacal place visited, whose existence is supported by no
believable evidence, but the journey itself, a rugged and uphill
journey to be certain, with an abundance of twists and turns, some of
which are propitious, other ones not. This journey is well worth the
trouble, in my attitude. It is so individually of the above-mentioned
place visited, which persons are free to chase blindly or regard with
skepticism (and with detachment to boot, in the best case scenario). It
is all about the dignity of living and adoring and the delight of
succeeding in these difficult assignments. From this perspective, the
reason of life is none other than life itself, in partnership with our
fellow creatures; and happiness is made likely – inside certain limits –
by our striving to accomplish this worthy, albeit modest purpose.
The
limits enforced upon experienced happiness may primarily stick in our
craw, but after due consideration, as we recognize that life without
these limits would be death, we accept them, and better still we
greeting them. Life is by delineation a dynamic state that presupposes a
perpetual stress between desires and their approval. Render this
satisfaction absolute, you resolve this tension and consequently
decrease life to not anything; i.e., certain thing as inert as a pebble.
And this nothing – this inert something – is death, as I just sharp
out. Not a brilliant outlook in the eyes of a life lover!
