Pursuit Of Happyness -
It Shouldn't Be A Pursuit
Happiness Your Birthright
The pursuit of happyness seems to be the most natural thing to engage in. Happiness is an indisputable right of every human being.
We all believe that happiness is something desirable and attainable. We all seek that feeling of pure relaxation or fulfilled-desire that induces a certain glow into our lives, that glow of contented well-being.
Why Pursue Happiness
As living in the twenty first century becomes more demanding so has the pursuit of happyness.
People all over the world have embraced and accepted this pursuit with the enthusiasm that is only matched by their dislike of what they want to leave behind.
Although each of us would define happiness differently, the pursuit of it takes some form of a desire to change something about our current life. We convince ourselves that we can’t be happy or we will only be happy if 'this' or 'that' happened.
Each of us have a heart-felt yearning for happiness hence the reason our determination in the pursuance of it. If you think about it, most of activities you engage in are because you believe that in the doing of them, your life will be happier.
Even advertisements on any media are geared towards making you check whether your right to be happy is being fulfilled. If not, they claim that one of their products will surely do the job.
Happiness Can’t Be Pursued
Should happiness be pursued? Why add the pursuit of happyness to our other ever-present worries? Well, you don’t have to.
Happiness is available to you more readily and abundantly than you imagine. But
your ego
and wanting to change things from what they already are is what makes you feel as if you are being pursued by disasters instead of by happiness.
The curious effect of pursuing happiness is that you lose of sight an obvious fact: you find yourself unconsciously postponing your enjoyment until you reach a hoped-for place or time when everything will be ‘just right.’
More often than not, you find that happiness, if it comes at all, comes after strenuous effort and is often short-lived. Or you are probably too tired to enjoy it, or too busy working towards another brief episode.
You Can’t Earn Happiness
It is a common mistake to think that you can earn happiness through pursuit of other things.
Most popular are: education, wealth and power. Yet, look around at people who already have these; are they happy because of them?
Interestingly, even if you answer ‘no,’ there is some part of you that thinks it will different for you. Other people’s failures to find happiness in things may not lessen your belief in the same method.
For some reason everyone, because of our perceived separateness, believes that they are exempt from the general rules. The result?!!!!
We go at the pursuit of happyness in exactly the same old ways but somehow expect different results.
The majority of people are poor, so for them the pursuit of happyness means pursuit of wealth.
The thing is, as you pursue wealth, you lose the power of enjoying the essential pleasures of life.
Sadly, even if you are successful, you will find that lasting happiness has somehow eluded you.
Don’t get me wrong, I am not saying that education, wealth and power are wrong. I am merely highlighting the delusion that through these, you can attain what you truly seeking: happiness.
People who are reported to be the happiest may not have any of the things you think you should have to be happy.
This is reason why people are puzzled when they visit poor countries and find people to be friendly and not as unhappy as they would be if they were in the same situation.
This is because happiness comes from within. So the pursuit of happiness is an illusion BUT happiness is not.
Instead of thinking of the pursuit, enjoy the gaps in your thoughts. It is in these gaps,
free from thinking
, that you can experience the glee of both body and mind.
Repeat and extend these moments by making the best of whatever comes to you. Make ‘now’ a happy state of existence rather than habitually postponing the season of happiness to the future.
How To Find Happiness
It is only what you cultivate in yourself that can bring happiness.
You should be happy in the condition you are in, as you are and with what you have, moment by moment. You only have power to have happiness in the now, it is the only time there is.
The following links gives more information that will help you find the happiness that is so readily available to you:
“Happiness is a common right of the race " - Charles Warner Dudley
Return to Home Page From Pursuit Of Happyness