Head Over Heels

Rules for Happiness: something to do, someone to love, something to hope for-

At the beginning of yesterdays post I conveniently dropped in your lap a rather unfamiliar word: Eudaimonia. Depending on who you ask and what phase the moon currently resides in, Eudaimonia is most often translated as happiness or genuine happiness. For our conversation here, let’s adopt the more precise translation: Human flourishing, the path to reaching a perfect life (nirvana, moksha).

Keeping in the spirit of this blog-o-thing, I will try to keep this pithy and digestible. If we were to talk about happiness, normally, we toss out phrases like: “happiness as a state of mind“, “contentment“, “joy“, “pleasure“, “love“… All of these terms are caused by external factors. We obsess over money, how highly book “educated” we are, the $2500 newest and greatest carbon fiber road bikes, we even think the lousy weather outside has a great influence on the happiness we experience, day in and day out, while in all actuality, they have little if nothing to do with happiness at all.

The problem Dear Reader with these hedonistic, deleterious perspectives we have conveniently adopted?!? The exact moment the stimulus is taken swiftly away, the “happiness” they brought, albeit briefly, will disappear in a flash.

Notes:

Authentic spirituality makes us torchbearers of an inner light, your inner light! Alive in humility, courage, action, joy and love, we grow in self-awareness when external factors are removed. Only then are we open to experience the fulfillment of life and our true purpose.

Just don’t take my bike, please … I beg of you. Happiness would evade me if you did …