Happiness or human flourishing. How do we get to this state? How do we become happy? Well, all you have to do, truly, is walk along any street and have a look at the eyes of other people, and you realize very quickly that most people are not happy. Most people, in fact, are filled with anxiety, pain, suffering, I would say.
And wait a moment. We’re told by the philosophers, by Aristotle, for example, that we are all naturally happy but of course we have to work on this happiness because happiness is a state of being. It’s the journey. It’s the task. You know, and I always wonder to myself, how does one begin?
Well, little story. Today, I had some task. I had to go to a bureaucratic office and resolve some functions, some problems, and problems were resolved. And I remember leaving the office feeling this state of joy. And then I went along the road in my scooter, in my small motorcycle, and I almost had an accident.
And this state of joy, curiously, was very quickly vanquished. So, obviously, I gave myself that state of joy at the beginning, and then I virtually took it away. And then I remembered that many years ago, I was at a yoga conference in Southern India, and the yogi said that when I wake up in the morning, I can decide whether it’s going to be a good day or a bad day. I’m responsible for that particular day. So then this would mean that I can control my mood.
Now to be fair, some days when I wake up, I don’t try to say it’s a good day. Perhaps I’ve had some bad dreams. Perhaps I’ve had some frustrations, haven’t slept well, all of these things. And I don’t want it to be a good day because it would just be too artificial, too fake. But there are other days that I have to be filled with joy.
So then I push on into a more positive vein of thinking. So if this is true that I give myself joy, then how do I achieve this? How do I achieve this? And I guess to a very large extent, what I must think to myself is that because I’m in control of my reality, I can start to document when I’m happy and when I’m unhappy. I can write it down in my notebook.
I can very much flow in this sense because if this is true, I’m free to be me. Think of this now. I can have other relationships, but in reality, I cannot really jump inside your mind, your head, and feel the world or see the world in the same way you can. This is totally impossible. I can touch you.
I can feel the warmth of your body. But who are you? I’ll never truly know, but I do know who I am, I believe, and I can’t have a relationship with God, Gaia or the universe. So in that sense, I’m never alone. Then I must learn to talk to me and if I can learn to talk to me very much like Aristotle sort of intimates, then I can get on this path of joy.
Introspection will bring me joy, and it won’t be a perfect life. It won’t be totally resolved. There will be anxiety. There will be problems, but I can say to myself, hey, Leon, you’re 100% responsible for you. There’s no one to blame but you.
You’re not a victim. You’re not a victim. You’re not a victim. You’re actually a doer. You can accomplish something.
And I really think in life at some point we do have to decide whether I am a hero or a coward. Now I think it’s rather easy to be a coward. Friend of mine many years ago said to me, Leon, the reason that the majority of people are not happy, demonstratively happy, is because it’s hard to be happy. It’s very, very easy to be unhappy but the opposite is difficult And most people don’t want to spend the time. They don’t want to spend the intellectual effort to actually say to themselves, hey, hold on for a moment.
I’m going to push off and I’m going to try something different. And of course, we are filled with a lot of negativity in the world. But the next time you watch the news, ask yourself, have I ever been shot? Have I ever been stabbed? Have I ever been blown up?
The answer, of course, is no. I’ve only experienced goodness and I’ve only had social intercourse with good people, which means that if I’m truly interested in giving myself a state of happiness or a state of flourishing, then I can. Then it is totally, in that sense, totally up to me. I can do it. How exciting.
And you know what they say. You know what they say. Critical thinking is, of course, necessary. If I’m going to find happiness, if I’m going to find flourishing in my life, and critical thinking is great, truly great. You take care. Bye bye.