A while ago, in Happiness and Compassion, I had written about what Fahadh Fasil described as the biggest lesson he learnt from failure – he said it made him decide that he would only do things that made him happy. The more I read, the more I think, and the more I live, the more I start relating to what Fahadh is doing, and what Aristotle said, “Happiness is the meaning and the purpose of life, the whole aim and end of human existence.” Everything else – fame, power, money, compassion, detachment etc – is probably just the means we create.
The thing though is, even if happiness were indeed the purpose, I can see at least a couple of challenges. In this excellent read “10 truths you will learn before you find happiness“, the first point is “It is impossible for anyone else to define YOU”. This echoed my first challenge – a difficulty in defining what happiness is to me. At the next level, I felt that the paths to happiness are confusing and have many things going against them. For instance, fame – “..other people’s heads are a wretched place to be the home of a man’s true happiness.” (Schopenhauer) Or compassion/pity (not kindness, which I regard as a more active expression, though the following might apply to it as well) – “There is a certain indelicacy and intrusiveness in pity; ‘visiting the sick’ is an orgasm of superiority in the contemplation of our neighbour’s helplessness” (Nietzsche) As you can see, it isn’t difficult to bring each down.
But despite this, I still think I’m on the right track with happiness. In the unawareness of a moral universalism that everyone can agree on, I would choose my happiness as the compass for my own moral absolutism. And maybe, as the sixth ‘truth’ in the link shared earlier goes, the past and future don’t exist, and happiness is a transient phenomenon. Aiming for perpetual happiness is probably the easy mistake to make. This mistake then leads to errors in the trade offs that are made as we live our lives. After all, “Life is the continuous adjustment of internal relations to external relations.” (Herbert Spencer)
During a conversation with D a few days back, I caught myself saying, the more conscious choices I make, the easier I find to live with myself. A couple of days after that, I was introduced to the incomparable Atticus Finch , whose words summed it up very well
The hope is that if I can keep doing that, I will find my definition of happiness.