Today a friend asked me about happiness. How can we help people be happy? I've been around a bit, eight decades or so, and here's where I've come to when I think about happiness. It seems to me happiness is composed of two things, meaning and agency. Finding meaning and discovering the agency you have within that meaning is, I think, one of the ways we find happiness.

Happiness is an inside job. Nobody can do it but the person seeking to find their meaning and discovering their agency. You can point it out to them, it doesn't matter until they own it themselves, discover it for themselves, on their own. The blocks to happiness are judgment and the desire to control. You give up both and happiness is really close. It's right there at the touch of your fingertips. Those two things can gum up the works faster than anything else that I've ever seen.

We don't make the world, but we make our experience of it and only we do that. It's where we reign supreme. It is the control we have. It is the only control we can exert over the experiences that we have. Our control is our response, reaction, and the story we tell about our experience. The story makes the world we create around the things that happen to us. All of that drops away when you're clear about what you're doing and when you know what your place and role is in making that happen.


Happiness reveals itself, I believe, when we discover something that's meaningful. When we release judgment of others and ourselves. When we discover the agency we have to make that meaning rich and fully alive in our lives. We realize that the only control we have is over what we do and how we think and how we understand all of the experiences that add up to our one wild and precious life.

Happiness is an inside job. It comes when you're honest with yourself. When you understand the responsibility involved in agency. When you open your heart to what touches it and makes it vibrate with joy. Happiness can't be given. It can't be created for others. It's a discovery each of us makes by ourselves for ourself. We can share our discovery with others, and we can delight in others discovery of theirs. But we can't do it to anybody or for anybody. We can only do it to and for ourselves.

So if happiness is an inside job and you can't really do anything about it for other people, what about relationship? Where does that come in? My stance on that, in my own life, has been to spend time where I can experience awe, where I can experience being amazed by what exists. The unending source for that, for me, has been nature.

I've kind of come around to the fact that involving ourselves with nature, on a personal and deep level is incredibly healing, is incredibly awe-inspiring. It opens up deep wells of meaning and shows us our agency all in one beautiful basket. I've come around to the feeling that our sense of ennui, our hopelessness, our feeling lost, our feelings of being overpowered, of being inadequit, can all be addressed when we start to take care of the earth. When we learn to reconnect, to see the majesty of our planet and all the incredible life within it. When we understand the depth of commitment to life that everything on this planet expresses.

To appreciate the delicate balance that life expresses to life and the joy and exuberance that it shares just by existing. Sense of humor in an octopus. Oh, my heavens. What an amazing, amazing thing to watch. I find meaning in helping to keep that life alive and in appreciating it. There's meaning in appreciating the gifts that are so astoundingly plentiful, so abundantly, exuberantly all around us. I have discovered an incredible amount of agency in being able to help life become more abundant.

To help life thrive I do what I can to meet the various needs that come across my path. It can be as simple as the need of bacteria for the food from compost or the need for another soul to express and find itself. They're all the same thing. The ability to see another and to understand how you can help it achieve whatever it wants to achieve is an incredible gift. It's a real thrill. Seeing the light bulbs come on in the heads of students in class is very similar. There's agency in that. There's meaning in that.

I's so diverse. It's so unique. There's curiosity and adventure, intrigue, gratification, and awe. What more do you need? What more do you need? We are so lost, so lonesome. We feel so inadequate. And there's so much that could be done right here under our fingertips. The grand plan is filled with trillions and billions of little actions that make it possible. When you find the little actions that you can do, that you like doing, that give you joy, poof, life becomes meaningful. Appreciation and gratitude go both ways. It's delicious to discover what you can contribute.

It's very humbling to discover that what you contribute is you. It's really nothing else. We're all so unique. We all have the ability to see and do something no one else can. We're all these minor miracles walking around. It's fun to see the miracles that other people are and to occasionally appreciate your own as well. It's satisfying without being stultifying, it's engaging. It's joyful even when it's sad. Even when it's not understood, even when it isn't going the way you would like to see, or other people might like to see. When people get in their own way and you watch new possibilities deteriorate, it's still interesting, it's still amazing. Life always gives you another chance to be able to express the uniqueness that you are in whatever ways you can. Whatever works in the moment.

There's something about dancing with the moment that is very, very special, and it's very special when you get to do that with others. Holding life lightly, but exuberantly, respectfully, with great admiration, and allowing it to do its thing, whatever that is. being curious about the outcome, appreciating the opportunity, and being awed by the possibility. Not being attached to the outcome is another way to release the need to control. That's the opportunity that I like to offer to other people. Working with nature, helping to cool the planet, certainly keeps my heart alive, and I have to think it might do that for others as well, but everyone finds their own path to happiness.

I hear this all the time, but what does it really mean? How do you actualize it? What does it look like in action? How does that change/inform your behavior? How is the world different when that is a lived experience? I think these are important questions to ask each other and ourselves.

In working to turn this ship around I keep searching for the core, the foundation, the leverage point that will generate the most impactful change. We speak about ‘going back to nature’ about reconnecting to nature. So is nature the foundation, the core? We know we are a part of nature, but that doesn’t sit so well with some of us. We came out of the jungle, we don’t want to go back. We live in cities – how can people in apartments connect to nature?

Janine Benyus’s words about how nature really works, keep coming back into my head: All actions create the conditions that support life. Is it life that is the core, the foundation? Respect and reverence for life, is that the magic ingredient? I do believe that that is the path to shift us from where we are to where we need to be. Respecting and revering life! What does that look like? Are the Jains the perfect example? They walk, devotedly sweeping before them so they don’t step on an insect. They believe that revering life is avoiding death. Is that true in nature? Nature seems to accept death, not avoid it. So what does revering life look like?

All life is conscious and even some things that don’t seem conscious – like stones – can be seen as conscious. Physics tells us that the connections protons and neutrons have for each other exists no matter the distance. They respond to each other instantaneously no matter how far away they are from each other. They exhibit oneness. Therefore anything that has a boundary that is maintained is conscious – choosing to stay connected instead of breaking apart into individual parts. Is consciousness the core, the foundation?

Again I’d say yes. Consciousness is expressed in life and expressed through nature. For me that is why nature is so significant in our search for oneness. Nature is the expression of what it means to be so connected that everything is interconnected – nothing can exist without the other. Life and consciousness really do include us. We know – personally, when we have honored our own life and our own consciousness or dishonored them. Thinking this way offers up a real-time, personal system of measurement. We know when we are in touch and respectful of life, because we feel that disrespect inside of ourselves.

Western civilization is not designed for this. Robin Wall Kimmerer, in her book, Braiding Sweetgrass makes what was to me a startling revelation. In her native Potawatomi language there is no gender. There are no words that signify woman or man. The distinction that is crucial to them is animate or inanimate. Think about that; everything that is animate uses the same pronouns as are used for people, for family. Everything that is animate is a ‘who’ only inanimate things are its. Even stones are ‘who.’ This is the shift we need to make. We need to know, deep in our bones, that we are all one, that we are all important and worthy of respect and, yes, reverence – even other humans.
In Kashmir Shavism everything is God. Think about that, everything is God. As a practice that means that nothing is pushed away and everything has it’s place. Finding the ‘fit’ of horrible disasters into your life is a healing experience. Like in childbirth resistance is pain, so in life resistance is what brings the trauma and anguish that so cripples us. Embracing Life does not mean condoning awful things, but it does mean respecting the situation and dancing with it until the ‘fit’ becomes known. Much like running a rapids it is working with the powerful energies of the water that is the thrill of the adventure. We are all ONE – all entitled to respect and appreciation, to be experienced with gratitude and yes, even reverence.