happiness

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.