Happiness – everyone wants it, but what is it? How do you get it?
Excitement is easy. Anyone can name things that would excite him or her – a new car, that sharp outfit, winning the lottery, all kinds of stuff. Our imaginations literally swarm with images of things that we believe will make us a winner in life. We get excited just thinking about getting those things. And when we get them we are just over-the-top with joy.
But how do those things feel a week later, or a month or a year later? That excitement fades quickly. Even that big lottery win looses its jazz rather quickly. Within five years most lottery winners are right back where they started financially. Emotionally things stop being exciting before a month has gone by.
From my perspective excitement is a very different feeling from happiness. The example I used this morning was comparing winning a $1000 jackpot on a slot machine versus taking golf lessons for a year and taking a first place in a beginner’s tournament. The excitement from the win at the casino will probably be faded by the next day, while the feeling of accomplishment and happiness at your accomplishment with the golf will last a long time.
In my experience happiness is tied to my ability to manifest myself in some way. Turning a potential within me into a reality feels good forever. This is the process of self-actualization. Expanding who I am and bringing it into actual existence has an inherent feeling of inner rightness. Self-actualization produces an inner feeling of self approval and happiness – most of the time.
There is more to it than just self-actualization. There seems to be a larger agenda involved because not every actualization produces the desired feeling. Most people do not feel ok actualizing their potential to kill another human being, but it happens all the time. There are all kinds of actualizations that can give us the opposite feeling to rightness and happiness. What skill developments do lift us up and which don’t takes us a step deeper into the source of unhappiness.
Each new thing we learn expands our skills for relating to life. More skills give us greater freedom, since freedom is the ability to relate to whatever life tosses at us in a way that is successful for us. Freedom is not the absence of relationship, quite the opposite. Freedom is possessing super successful relationship skills. Freedom is one of those feeling good places of being. But still, the term successful is a part of that definition. What is successful?
A bit of philosophy here: our job in being alive is to both create and connect. Around 98% of the time creation and connection conflict with each other. Any time you create you have to temper your creation to take into account the needs and feelings of others. And anytime you connect you are challenged to shine out with who you are, but in a way that does not disregard others. Success is when your creation also enhances your connection. Success is that 2% in which shining out with who you are and what you do supports life such that life supports you back. In some arenas this is called win-win relationships.
The infinite diversity of life is all about how people try to balance these two principles – creation and connection. Failures abound around us. Seeking power so you can get your way totally fails the respectful connection test. Consequently power never makes you happy, even though it might be very exciting. The lack of connection it produces is always gnawing at you underneath, stealing your happiness. On the opposite end of the spectrum, creating lots of friends by being a co-dependent or a people pleaser may work well at producing lots of connection, but it denies you the expression of your truth and inhibits your creation process. So this is another failure.
The deck is definitely stacked towards a very specific outcome. It is almost as though it is all designed intentionally. We see these same principles in action at home, at work, at play, in the larger world, everywhere. It is like we are given this hero’s quest to achieve two seemingly opposite goals when each individual goal is a lifetime’s work. I call this the spiritual ratchet.
We are born into this world with almost no skills. We have parents or some sort of teachers that try to give us very basic “how to participate with life” skills based on whatever they know, and a load of their fears about all the stuff they don’t know. If that is all there was, we would be stuck with whatever they taught us. But we have this inner drive for happiness and fulfillment. This impels us to challenge their fears and try out different approaches to life. We acquire skills along the way through trial and error. When something we try works to help us create, we take a step up. If it does not cost us connection, we keep it. If it costs us too much connection, we dump it. The same happens with connection skills. What works to enhance our connection without costing us our expression of our truth, our creation, we keep and we climb up another step on the ladder toward self-realization. This back and forth is the spiritual ratchet.
What holds us back? Fear seems to be number one on the list – one we react to as though our survival depended on it. There are so many opportunities we never try out because we are afraid we will fail and somehow lose our survival. Generally this is an inner lie, probably taught us by parents who fell for the same lie. All we really risk most of the time is our comfort, not survival. We tend to see comfort as safety. Comfort is the feeling that we know how to get along with things just as they are, so we don’t want to change anything. This sort of inertia is the death of so much potential in this life. It also kills your chances for fulfilling happiness in life.
Connect without loosing your passion and
be passionate without losing your connection.
Happiness is for the bold and adventuresome at heart. Fearfulness and attachment to comfort are the sources of our unhappiness – not because we don’t have whatever wins or excitement or thing or relationship we believe will make us ok. It won’t. Happiness is an inside-out feeling that comes from us expanding to reach our fulfillment of potential. What that potential is will be different for each person. So fulfillment looks different for everyone. But it is not about the outside. Happiness is an inside thing. You have to be happy with you. The more you are happy with you the better life looks to you.
So be bold. Express who you are through the creation that is your life. Connect with those around you. Figure out how to be a positive part of their lives so much that they love and support your creations. Find that 2% win-win solution to the puzzle of life – the hero’s journey. Be the hero in your life.