"I keep remembering one of my Guru’s teachings about happiness. She says that people universally tend to think that happiness is a stroke of luck, something that will maybe descend upon you like fine weather if you’re fortunate enough. But that’s not how happiness works. Happiness is the consequence of personal effort. You fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it, and sometimes even travel around the world looking for it. You have to participate relentlessly in the manifestations of your own blessings. And once you have achieved a state of happiness, you must never become lax about maintaining it, you must make a mighty effort to keep swimming upward into that happiness forever, to stay afloat on top of it."
Elizabeth Gilbert
Eat, Pray, Love
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We just finished a book in my English Novel in the 18th Century class. As most books we've read thus far deal with some sweeping form of modern philosophy, this particular book was about happiness, and how one attains it.
The main character, Rasselas, is born in Happiness Valley, in Arabia. He sets out to "experience the misery of others," as his guru has explained to him, "so that he may find happiness in his own fortune."
The basic end of the book is just as you wrote: happiness is not something that we stumble across, that we recognize, or that we even create. It's something so ambiguous that no truly happy person can explain their happiness, as they do not see it as a self-fulfilled construct of their being, but as a side-effect of living their life.
My happiness comes as a result of finding you, of finding so much joy in words and food, and of learning that nothing worth having is ever totally in my control. I didn't find those things to achieve Happiness -- I found simple happiness in finding those things.
So I love you. And I love you even more for being happy with me. :)
My happiness comes from all the great people in my life, from my George, from really great work (the presentation today was the "bomb" -not "a bomb", from a clean house...aka the maid was here, great wine, great food (like Steven said) and from you.
Love, MOM
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