Happiness Is A State We Choose Or Chooses Us

 

 

“Your life has an inner purpose and an outer purpose. Inner purpose concerns Being and is primary. Outer purpose concerns doing and is secondary." – Eckhart Tolle

Happiness is simply a state of mind that we choose, or chooses us.  How desperately gloomy it is when we allow life to batten us down to a low-level sadness, or worse, and we simply are surviving rather than finding any enjoyment and fulfilment out of whatever we can do when we are doing Life or life is Doing us. 

Trying to love our life, no matter our situation, is some of the hardest work we can ever do.  Sometimes life truly sucks.  I am working hard on trying to love the people, places, things, that try to make my life hard.  I am trying to love the teachings of the moments, all moments, and it takes a real change of ideology to do so.  I am wont to be defensive and I rush headlong into trying to control situations, when it is just so much easier to try to turn the thought processes and reactions from that into finding a positive, or positives.  I am a slow learner, it seems, and I know this of myself so I have to be on guard when I sense frustration growing.  It takes steady plodding through each day, watching for situations that will add to frustration.  I am not a bitchy negative person, and so I easily recognize, now, when those feelings are slipping in between the cracks of my day.  Being mindful is hard work at fist but I can focus on it more easily if I do not look too far ahead with intentions for the day.  Right ow, I am working on a day, minute to minute, mindfulness.  To do this, I stay in tune with sensations in my body, in my thoughts, in my feelings, and in my spirit.  I can not do the whole Eckhart Tolle idea of being quiet and still and am still a Type A personality that has things to be done.  (Long ago I told the Bee Man not to plan MY day until after 10 am because by then I will have my “to do” list in my head done.)  I do not have to achieve things to be happy.  I am learning to just take life one step at a time for a day or two while I re-energize from my summer of service.  I refuse to let anything pile up on me, whether it is physically, intellectually, emotionally, or spiritually.  There is a type of awareness that this takes. 

It is like a still small thing running in the background of my day.  No rush.  No schedules.  Nothing but simply moving through moments of time and feeling the best of it.

Be intent on action, not the fruits of action.
Avoid attraction to the fruits and attachment to inaction!
Perform actions firm in discipline, relinquishing attachment.
Be impartial to failure and success;
This equanimity is called discipline.

- Bhagavad Gita

Happiness is truly a state of mind.  No one can make me feel anything we do not want to feel.  I choose happy.  The highest state of Happiness, to me, is that place I have come to know as Peace that I sink in to when I am engrossed in doing a painting.   It is a timeless space.  It is a state of meditation and prayer.  That is the happiness I seek and the happiness that finds me when I move into doing art.  It is Not receiving something I wanted.  It is not attaining something.  It is almost a space of “nothingness” but is a state of huge nothingness that wraps itself around me like a comforter.  Does that make sense?  It is the best way I can explain it.  It is a place of ALL and ENOUGH.  It is, I know… I know... it is a place of no attachments… yes, no attachments to any sense other than hand holding brush or pencil or pen and the sound of a brush dipping in water and washing on a background…  yes, that is it.. a detachment from any outcome… happiness is a choice I make by doing art every day just to get to that place…  I put myself in a space and place for happiness to find me.

I wish us all that kind of happiness. 

©Carol Desjarlais 10.7.22