Happiness

I have yet to encounter a single person who is not pursuing happiness in one form or another. I fully believe that the desire to be happy stands at the heart of everything we choose to want.

I have asked many people how they experience happiness. They usually respond by describing the things they feel when they are happy. They use such words and phrases as peaceful, joy, calm, rewarding, satisfied, grateful, fun, closeness, no stress, confident, accomplished, and so forth. These are all great descriptions and I am sure you could add more to the list.

Happiness is indeed all of these things, but it is not any one of them separately. In fact, it is not even several of these descriptions combined if they are separated from the rest.

For example, we can often feel happy when we are having fun so some people may conclude that fun is the source of happiness. You can do things that are fun and feel happy doing them, but happiness is more than just having fun. People who misunderstand this point will tend to pursue happiness by choosing to do things that are fun. However, when the fun is over, so is the happiness.

Some will conclude that happiness can be found in the absence of stress, so they will pursue happiness by doing anything that relieves, removes, or allows them to escape from stress or the things that cause it. They may be convinced that this is the only way they can be happy, but then they return to unhappiness when they are faced with things that cause stress or in the anticipation of having to face them again in the future. They will then construct their lives around stress avoidance. Such an approach creates all sorts of imbalances, chaos, and contortions. Life that is lived like this is like residing in a house where you enter and exit by any means other than the front door.

I have encountered others who believe that happiness is found in the escape from their daily routines of work, responsibility, and fulfilling their roles. Their goals in life are centered on the one or two vacations they can take each year. The passage of their lives is marked by their getaways. They truly enjoy the time away, there is no denying that, but then they plunge back into life again afterwards and it is not long before the planning begins for the next retreat which will be months away and life is endured until then.

These conclusions are faulty facts and are just a sample of dozens of facts we can create around happiness.

Most all of us have created or are trying to create a plan for our happiness. It will be composed around our ideas of what creates happiness. These ideas may come from past experiences or from assumptions, conclusions, and so forth. These hopes for happiness then drive many of the decisions we make in life.

The question is: What is happiness and how do you achieve it?

Everyone has experiences with short-term happiness and are quick to point out what generates if for them. It could be shopping, a vacation, personal time, a hobby, etc., but because everyone has personal preferences, what makes one person happy may not be a source of short-term happiness for the next. I believe that this one fact, i.e. that there are many sources of short-term happiness, causes people to conclude that there must be a hundred versions of happiness and so each person is free to pursue their version of it.

I suggest that our plans for pursuing happiness are created without a full understanding of what happiness is or can be. I suggest that it is possible to pursue a level of happiness that is more than these short-term pursuits. I suggest that one aspect of true happiness is that it is long-term and sustainable.

Sometimes it is easier to see what something is by identifying what it is not.

First, happiness is not found in the pursuit of anything that violates whatever morale or ethical compass you have chosen for your life. You cannot find happiness in anything that you consider to be wrong even if you try to convince yourself that it is not wrong. People know what is right and wrong. I have seen people spend considerable time and effort convincing themselves that something they understood to be wrong can now be alright. They work diligently to numb themselves so that wrong can be right and then they believe they can pursue that thing being fully justified, but at the end of the day, it does not work. Pursuing something that you know is wrong no matter how hard you have tried to convince yourself that it is right, is not capable of producing happiness.

Second, you have learned from the Center Path Program that going North or South does not produce happiness. It is impossible for North and South to produce long-term, sustainable happiness.

Third, long-term, sustainable happiness is not found in the acquisition or possession of material things. This is not a moral or ethical statement. It is simply an observation based on your control of your own happiness. Things can be lost, broken, and taken. If you conclude that happiness resides here, then you have relinquished your control of your own happiness to things that are flakey, unreliable, and undependable.

For example, I have heard people say that we will be happy as soon as we buy that new car, as soon as we are in the house of our dreams, or as soon as I am making a certain amount of money. What if those things do not happen, for whatever reason? Does that mean that these people are now destined to be unhappy? That is a silly conclusion.

Fourth, in like manner to number three, happiness is not found in what people think of you. To believe it reside here is again to relinquish control of your happiness to the whims and flakey thinking of other people.

Fifth, happiness is not on a timeline. For example, some people think that they will be happy as soon as they are out of school, as soon as their kids get older, as soon as they acquire that next thing, as soon as they complete the project, as soon as they are out of this challenge, and so forth. Again, this is handing over control of one’s happiness to something over which they may have little or no control. You do not have to wait for happiness. You can have it as soon as you would like it.

These five descriptions of what happiness is not are some of the boundaries that we can place around happiness. They tell us where to look and where not to look for happiness. Like fences around a pasture, these five things tell us that happiness resides inside the fences, not on the outside.

Center Path has additional descriptions of what happiness is which helps refine our focus of what to pursue in our quest to enjoy long-term, sustainable happiness.

In the course of life, we interact in relationships, with reality, and with our own wants. In the Center Path program, I have described how to measure the strength of relationships, our capacity to respond to the demands of reality, and the maturity of our want choices. Each of these is described by a maturity model, i.e. the Relationship Maturity Model™, the Trust Maturity Model™, and the Want Choice Maturity Model™.

I have discovered that as a person becomes happier as he or she improves his or her standing in these three models.

The happiness that comes from functioning at these levels is a natural consequence. This is a prosperity that money cannot buy. It is, however, available to anyone and everyone.

These people can navigate any challenge that comes their way and can do so with calm perspective, fortitude, persistence, and strength. He or she will be a participant in the challenge, not a victim and will benefit from the challenge, not be weakened by it. This person will have long-term, sustainable happiness.

You can find out more about the first two maturity models in the publications Center Path Relationships and in Natural Prosperity.