I heard someone saying: “Happiness is that state you are in now. You don’t need more of that.”
That, of course, is very true, because when you’re happy you’re happy now, and that happiness is just happiness. I mean, I doubt if you can have degrees of happiness. Happy is happy. Sort of.
Yet, there can be something more about that state of happiness, which perhaps is best described as gratitude. That is actually being thankful for your happiness, which is a kind of happiness in itself, by the way. A sort of meta-happiness. But still happiness. Now. Always now.
When we think or reflect about our happiness and want to prolong it or have it more and more, or all our life, than it becomes something else. Then, indeed, “you need more of it.” That kind of reflecting about happiness can happen in the moment of our happiness, but also, perhaps more often even, when we are unhappy. It’s then that we probably will start to seek happiness.
There’s nothing wrong I think with seeking happiness. Because don’t we deserve it? But as long as we’re seeking, the fact also is that we’re not feeling happy. So, there’s one lesson to be learned there: don’t seek for happiness if you’re happy. That sounds perhaps awkward, but if you would seek more happiness when being happy, you lose happiness. You immediately lose being happy in that moment of doing so.
Now, there’s also something strange around happiness, I’ve discovered. That when you seek happiness, you don’t find it. Instead, happiness sort of happens to you. I think that “finding” happiness is rather like this: it’s consistently letting go of that what makes you unhappy. And then … at some point, unexpectedly, happiness shows itself.
That’s about it, I feel. It’s not to be found, it’s to be dis-covered. And then you also realize that it was actually always there. It was you, yourself — all that time — hampering it to show its face.
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