“It doesn’t matter how long we may have been stuck in a sense of our limitations. If we go into a darkened room and turn on the light, it doesn’t matter if the room has been dark for a day, a week, or ten thousand years — we turn on the light and it is illuminated. Once we control our capacity for love and happiness, the light has been turned on.” –Sharon Salzberg
Yeah, of course we all want to be happy, that wonderful feeling inside that makes us excited about everything, and hopeful for the future.
What I wanted to talk about here is our overall state of mind, and what it is that can make us happy. There are an awful lot of unhappy people in the world today for a myriad of reasons. However, I believe that one huge problem which causes a great deal of discontent has to do with the fact that too many people spend a great portion of their life looking for what can make them happy. That to me is like the proverbial, “placing the cart before the horse”, it simply does not work that way
I am going to let you in on a very important secret, and that is a very important key to happiness. True happiness is borne, not through looking for whom or what might make you happy, but rather looking for who you might make happy, and then happiness will find you! Whilst you think you know what will make you happy, and off you go to pursue it, you soon find out that happiness tends to evade you. Why is this? Well for one, by setting a mental standard of what to you might seem to be just what will make you happy, once you finally get what is coming to you, more often than not, it does not come up to snuff and you end up not being “as happy” as you had hoped.
One example of this concept is, have you ever really wanted something so bad, like a computer for example, you save up for it and the time finally comes that you buy it! Yahoo! You take it home, you get it set up, and it is great and all, but then you notice the following day that they just put out a new model that performs a bit better than yours! Oh my! You are once again not as happy as you had hoped! You are looking to be made happy, instead of having that joy of gratefulness that you finally got that computer you had been saving up for, and are so happy that today you are able to do so much more than you were doing before. Seems like a silly example, but that is how we tend to operate as individuals, we tend to look around and compare with others and see what they have and we don’t. Not a good idea!
So, if you want to be happy, look around you and see who you might make happy and you will soon find out that true happiness comes from this very principle, and that is once again, give and it will be given to you! It will work in your love life, it works at work, it works always. Just don’t ever expect anything in return and you are sure to never be disappointed, in fact in time it will all come back to you multiplied many times over!
Try it, you just might like it! Then tell me about it!
