How dare I not only desire to maintain my life but to enjoy it? Maintaining life entails protecting it against predators, diseases, competitors and fatal acts of nature; those things that would end it. Enjoying life entails consciously evolving the experiential wisdom to better assess events as they exist, irrelevant to any purpose with which one might intend to access them.
When I first began my graphics business I gave it the slogan “dare to be happy” when I realized what a challenge it was to remain happy in the public face of gloom painted in pixels of individual faces drained of brighter possibilities as they wrestled with the daily demands of a past traded in for a promise.
This “happy” I dare to be can be thought of as the intrinsic energy of the being I always am, from birth to my inevitable death. Daring the happy being to manifest itself in events is a matter of realizing benefit results only from the generosity of a happy being — all else entails new debt.
The challenge is in remaining aware of this ample energy while daily dealing within a society constantly being conditioned to atone for multiple inadequacies from original sin to acne by authorities damning the naturally happy individual variation of the human genome we cannot help but be at our deepest core, no matter how buried under guilt and almost forgotten our own energy may be.
The belief that happiness is a carrot on a stick, to be earned to be deserved, is the western civilization version of the middle-eastern, “Man is riding a camel in search of a camel.”
Photos by Heather Knight, my daughter
Photos by Heather Knight, my daughter
4 comments:
if you're in the position to be happy, it is downright sinful to not take advantage!
Tom, happy is not subject external conditions, only forgotten in their distraction.
Lasting happiness comes from internal peace. Even in the midst of storms in your life, can you still find happiness when at peace.
Happiness to me has always been the emotional response to the state of our heart.
I like the camel quote because it's so true. We're so wrapped up in the everyday that quite often we forget that we're actually pretty happy.
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