If we set out in search of happiness, we are sure to end up disappointed, frustrated and even more unhappy. This is because happiness is not something to be found. Happiness is not determined by what’s happening around you, but rather what’s happening inside you. This is part three of a three-part post on ‘In Search of Happiness’. This post tells you where happiness lies.
Where, then, does happiness lie?
In forgetfulness, not indulgence, of the self. In escape from sensual appetites, not in their satisfaction. We live in a dark, self-enclosed prison, which is all we see or know if our glance is fixed ever downward. To lift it upward, becoming aware of the wide, luminous universe outside – this alone is happiness. At its highest level, such happiness is the ecstasy that mystics have inadequately described. At more humdrum levels, it is human love; the delights and beauties of our dear earth, its colours and shapes and sounds; the enchantment of understanding and laughing, and all other exercise of such faculties as we possess; the marvel of the meaning of everything, fitfully glimpsed, inadequately expounded, but ever present. - Malcolm Muggeridge
If you observe a really happy man you will find him building a boat, writing a symphony, growing double delphiniums in his garden, or looking for dinosaur eggs in the Gobi Desert. He will not be searching for happiness as if it were a collar button that has rolled under the radiator. He will not be striving for it as a goal in itself. He will have become aware that he is happy in the course of living life twenty-four crowded hours of the day. - Unknown
Happiness comes most to persons who seek her least, and think least about it. It is not an object to be sought; it is a state to be induced. It must follow and not lead. It must overtake you, and not you overtake it. How important is health to happiness, yet the best promoter of health is something to do. Blessed is the man who has some congenial work, some occupation in which he can put his heart, and which affords a complete outlet to all the forces there are in him. - John Burroughs
Our notions of happiness entrap us. We forget they are just ideas; our ideas of happiness can actually prevent us from being happy. We fail to see the opportunity for joy that is right in front of us when we are caught in a belief that happiness should take a particular form. - Thich Nhat Hanh
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A Spanish Restaurant – Meson la Mezquita
Life’s Little Lessons
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