Happiness is Elusive

This is part of an essay I wrote recently.

Happiness is just a feeling—get high, get happy. I’ll feel happy if I sleep with him. If more people liked me, if I had more stuff, if I partied every night, I would feel happy. Happy. Happy. Happy. What an endlessly monotonous process, the pursuit of happiness. In his poem “Endymion,” John Keats asks the question, “wherein lies happiness” (ll.24.777). How does one locate it? Some live their entire lives centered on finding someone or something that makes them happy in an empty world filled with empty activities. Aristotle writes in book one of his Nichomachean Ethics: “Happiness is the meaning and the purpose of life, the whole aim and end of human existence.” The world defines happiness as a feeling, a passing emotion that comes and goes like sunshine on a cloudy day. But true happiness, contentment, the fulfillment of the human heart, is so much more than a feeling, and it has to come from somewhere else, something whole and lasting, something otherworldly. To find that elusive contentment, one must abandon the pursuit of the shallow.

Without pursuing the permanent God, the permanent longing of the human heart can never be adequately filled. Qoheleth, the writer of Ecclesiastes, realized that God has “set eternity in the heart of man” (Ecc. 3:11, NIV). He tried everything under the sun yet finally turned to the eternal God for solace. Because humans have that longing for eternality imprinted on their hearts, fulfillment of those longings can only come from an eternal source. This world is full of futile pursuits that lead nowhere but to more futility. Humanity can only solve meaninglessness through the joy and contentment found in the everlasting God.

To find contentment, one must pursue God, the only real satisfaction. Happiness is a fickle lover, but the inner peace that comes from knowing God lasts as long as he does. People always try to find happiness in the wrong sectors of life. Looking deeper means looking for the one who fulfills every longing, because he is completely whole. Pursuing wealth, sex, or alcohol backfired a long time ago—they don’t fulfill the human heart’s deepest longings for contentment. Other people will come and go; material possessions will come and go; youth and beauty will come and go. When people stop chasing the feeling of happiness and begin to seek the satisfaction of the eternal, they truly will find abundant life. As fleeting happiness shows its face, true contentment lies along the path to that God who longs to give complete joy.

 

[photo credit: Ryan McGinty]

"The activity of happiness must occupy an entire lifetime; for one swallow does not a summer make."

Aristotle

Life is to be lived

look for me just behind that bend, that's where i'll be, behind all the memories of yesterday
it doesn't appear to be fading that fog that's inside of me
if you turn on your brights in fog you get blinded.
so how do i see my way out of this mess? (can you help me?)
i'm wiping my eyes but windshield wipers don't usually come with the package deal

forget love i'd rather fall in chocolate. hidden significance apparently.
obviouslyy.
but why won't anyone show me?

Find out who you are and then they'll find you, unless you die first.
ha.. ha.. ha. morbid jokes don't mean much until you're dead and then you realize how dead you really are
if he's dead then we're all dead
but that tomb is empty and i looked inside
he lives so show me, how it is, how it is to love and live

don't regret it just love it
live it well live it long live it good
but don't forget to love it

"no love is true save that which loves forever."
~Aristotle, Rhetoric

[photo credit: Ben Heine]

Love... is a thing with feathers, that perches in the soul

"It is pleasant to be loved, for this too makes a man see himself as the possessor of goodness, a thing that every being that has a feeling for it desires to possess: to be loved means to be valued for one's own personal qualities."

Aristotle, Rhetoric

"Keep a guard over your eyes and ears as the inlets of your heart, and over your lips as the outlet, lest they betray you in a moment of unwariness. Receive, coldly and dispassionately, every attention, till you have ascertained and duly considered the worth of the aspirant; and let your affections be consequent upon approbation alone. First study; then approve; then love. Let your eyes be blind to all external attractions, your ears deaf to all the fascinations of flattery and light discourse. --These are nothing-- and worse than nothing -- snares and wiles of the tempter, to lure the thoughtless to their own destruction. Principle is the first thing, after all; and next to that, good sense, respectability, and moderate wealth. If you should marry the most agreeable man in the world, you little know the misery that would overwhelm you, if, after all, you little know the misery that would overwhelm you, if, after all, you should find him to be a worthless reprobate, or even an impracticable fool."

Anne Brontë, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

"Indeed, it is always the first sign of love, that besides enjoying some one's presence, we remember him when he is gone, and feel pain as well as pleasure, because he is there no longer."

Aristotle, Rhetoric

(Who knew Aristotle had such good things to say?)

Yes, yours, my love, is the right human face,
I in my mind had waited for this long,
Seeing the false and searching for the true,
Then found you as a traveller finds a place
Of welcome suddenly amid the wrong
Valleys and rocks and twisting roads. But you,
What shall I call you? A fountain in a waste,
A well of water in a country dry,
Or anything that’s honest and good, an eye
That makes the whole world bright. Your open heart,
Simple with giving, gives the primal deed,
The first good world, the blossom, the blowing seed,
The hearth, the steadfast land, the wandering sea.
Not beautiful or rare in every part.
But like yourself, as they were meant to be.

Edwin Muir, "The Confirmation"


'Survive Love"

 by myself

hey love, welcome back, i missed you.
hey love, you don't need to stay that's really okay.
(but yes you're reading me correctly love, i already made dinner)
hey love, you think i'll end up all right?
look i found the dawn! over in the west...or does it rise in the east? i can never remember.
but he's here.
welcome back dawn, welcome back fireflies, welcome back agony.
sparklers sunshine dresses heart you fluff and nonsense go away.
it's fabulous in the springtime, isn't it my dear? 
find you find me find everything we're looking for but it's not true
oh you hush devil on my shoulder.
i choose to welcome it no matter which way it goes
welcome back my love

[Photo credit to Robert Norbury]