The pursuit of happiness – a pipe dream or maybe even a pipe bomb dream.

If I were a guessing man, and as you know I am, I would bet the second most asked question in this life - behind "Why am I here?" - is, "How do I find happiness?" I may have the order reversed but I think those two are at the top. Chasing happiness is what we are all engaged in each and every day, even though I don’t think many of us even recognize it. So I started pondering - Why does it seem that happiness runs hot and cold for most and is very dependent and unpredictable? To be brutally honest - the fact is that we can't all be happy all of the time! For most of us (above 99%) our pursuit of happiness alone always and ultimately ends in frustration for us. The term “life’s a bitch and then you die” has some hard truth in it………. If you allow it. We so often base our happiness on things that outside of our control, external factors, if I get this raise I will be happy, if I lose this last 20 pounds I will be happy and on and on. My Mom used to say A LOT that “what if can go on forever” and when I was a kid, I did not have a full understanding of exactly what that meant. I am not sure my definition now is what she had in mind when she said it but “what if can go on forever” has taken on significant meaning to me now.

What if could go on forever – meaning we could spend our lives worrying about the raise, the last 20 pounds or whatever we think will make us happy. In the meantime we miss the ride because we are so focused on the achieving the goal, when I get this raise I will be happy because I will be able to do so and so with the extra money. Well if the raise never comes it tends to dash, violently against the rocks, our happiness. That approach has a more important resultant factor as well, it does not bring happiness but actually brings the inverse of happiness. We get upset and angry about it and then we get into a cycle that has the potential to make us jaded about the sheer wonder of life and of the beauty that surrounds us. So how do we get out of this vicious cycle? For me I gave up on the chase for happiness because I found it a futile cause. WHAT you might ask – especially for those who know me to be a fairly balanced dude who seems happy most of the time. What I found as a solution to the “life is a bitch and then you die” scenario was to learn to become content, because unlike happiness contentment is something that CAN last because it is not tied to external factors. It is something that CAN be enjoyed all of the time.

Contentment, in life, is the solid foundation upon which happiness and most other emotions can most easily express itself. Yet contented people do not depend on happiness for satisfaction in their life. I am not saying that I have no happiness in my life, I lead a very fulfilling life and happiness does arise now and again and when it does I savor and cherish it. I have faced adversities in my life, like all of us, but during those moments of struggle and strife when happiness seems impossible I still cope and still derive satisfaction from life. To me contentment is about eagerly accepting and embracing what are lives are, not what we want our lives to be. I use the hard times to explore the countless possibilities available to me, things that would not be apparent if I were being blinded by ego and enticed by those easy habits of fantasizing the pointless instead of focusing on the reality of my situation. If it sounds like I am cutting myself off from the high peaks and the low valleys I want you to know that is not the case. I find true happiness and true fulfillment in my life by examining what is truly real, in this moment and not worrying about what shoulda been or coulda been or what woulda been.

For me to be content I had to identify what I had to work with and meditate on that, or since I am a Hillbilly I like to call it ponderin, yeah with no G at the end. I had to find out who I was, not on a superficial level but who and what I truly was, deep down and at the core. After some long and very hard looks in the mirror I realized I did not like who was looking back. I may have hated what I saw, but by the time a saw it I did realize that hating it was all about my perception and preoccupation with happiness and ignoring the reality of my situation. Once I was able to honestly look at myself then came the hard work of changing what I found, not in an attempt to be happy but in an attempt to become a better person. If we cannot accept ourselves for what we truly are we will be lured into the trap and spend a lot of our time wishing we were someone else which was the hump I had troubles getting over. Once I was able to remove the rose colored glasses I was looking at my unvarnished life and was able to start seeing my true self with fresh resolve. I began to realize that I was the master of my own destiny and I need not be a slave to social convention. Never again was I going to compare myself to others or shy away from who I was, and would become. By finding the real me, I still did not like myself yet, I was able to take on the world with a renewed confidence, my footing was firmly planted in honest contentment.

Along the way I received advice from many corners, from the “Prince of Paradox”, G.K. Chesterton with his quote "True contentment is a thing as active as agriculture. It is the power of getting out of any situation all that there is in it. It is arduous and it is rare" Think about that for just a minute, get everything there is from each moment in your life – it does not matter what the moment brings pull it in, hug it and make peace with it. It may be distasteful at first but to get to the dessert….. And then there is old Marcus Aurelius with “Your life is what your thoughts make it” That to me just means your day is what YOU decide it is, it is completely within your control, all you have to do is shake off the restraints that society has imposed upon you. And then some of my favorite come from the Buddha, “believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who said it, no matter if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense”. Agrees with your own reason and your own common sense, there is a lot to contemplate in those three quotes and they are much more than simple quotes in my life. My journey, quest if you will and I might, has brought me to the conclusion that ego is the biggest fantasy that has an enormous amount of destructive power for people. Once I found who I was and the shackles of ego were broken I got to see the world in a whole new way. No more were my own demons, fantasies and delusions going to impact my everyday decisions. No more was ego going to persuade me to make poor choices nor was I going to let the dark clouds of my oscillating emotions continue to rain on my parade, it is my life and I was not going to let outside factors ruin it for me.

For me, contentment is my normal state of mind, it is not a fleeting thing that is dependent on good luck, (I have none) money, (I have even less), beauty (less than none) or any other outside factor. I try hard to simply look at the world the way it truly is, without the white wash of “what if” I used to apply to it. I am not sure why I was addicted to the emotional rollercoaster of life, I guess it seems exciting and for a while it was but much sooner rather than any later the superficialness and impermanence of the experience will let us down, every time. A continuous and simple ponder session is what still works for me, I like to sit on the beach and watch the sun come up but I can simply sit quietly, where ever I am, and close my eyes and watch my thoughts, in an open minded and honest way. At first it was a cacophony of drivel, ridiculous thoughts, worries and concerns that really had no impact on my life and yet I was spending all this time pondering them, I had to turn them off. I modified a technique and adopted it into every aspect of my life, the 5-10-15 rule. I examine the stray thought and apply the 5-10-15 rule, what difference will this make in 5 minutes, what difference will it make in 10 days and what difference will it make in 15 years? The noise of life started to quite down almost immediately.

Like the Buddha, I encourage you to perform the self evaluation and not take my word for it, it is a different path for each of us and we each hold our own truth so each of our journeys are unique. We need to remember that we are so blessed, each and every one of us, if you are reading this you have an internet connection – you are blessed whether you want to admit it or not. When I was at the beach Saturday morning, I saw three houseless people making a home on the beach. We overlook the lucky existence we have as American’s, mostly because our ego blinds us the reality of the world around us.