Sunday, January 26, 2025

Looking for happiness

BBC has a story on a man's "searching for secret to happiness".

"Anyone that is fixated on making you feel happy all the time is selling you snake oil" ... "If I could pick one thing that made the greatest difference - after I had been stabilised with treatment - it was, and always will be, work." But not just workaholic type work...

Nobody will tell you what a brave, talented person you are for doing the work of real happiness. But you will feel it in the reactions of people you love, the gratitude of waking up without a sense of dread, the awareness of beauty around you. And knowing you will keep your commitments, and live as a person who doesn't just talk about caring for people but does their best to live that talk.

He quotes Raymond Carver's tombstone inscription, the ideas of which should sound very familiar to many of us (funny how Wikipedia ignores the religious (even if not explicitly christian) aspects of his life):

And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.

No comments: