A Life of Equations
The foolish man seeks happiness in the distance; the wise grows it under his feet. - James Oppenheim
Let’s take the five ‘W’s.
Who
What
Where
Why
When
Just suppose it were possible to quantify happiness. You can go along and be tested for your intelligence and get your quotient as a numeric value. What if you could do the same for happiness? Get a relative value for your happiness quotient or HQ. You could say that the seat of your happiness resided within your HQ. Where would you start?
There will be five ‘W’s of happiness and they work as a matrix that supply one another with energy, inspiration and an urge to be fulfilled. So my shameless plug is this, read my The Mechanics of Happiness - Engineering a Positive Approach to Your Life for some of my views and perspectives and you will be, hopefully, provoked to think and then, even better, provoked to take action within your own life.
We are all different. What makes one person happy doesn’t do it for another person. Suppose it’s a team sport and fans of opposing teams will be both happy and disappointed by the same result. We can see from this that happiness is a subjective quality based around the expectation and desire of the individual. If you expect something and desire it, it follows that you will be happy when you get it. However experience shows us that this is not always so and that even the reverse can apply. Sometimes, paradoxically, reaching one’s objective brings about a sense of disappointment or a loss of motivation because the very thing that kept us occupied and gave us a goal has been removed. What’s the solution?
We are empowered by our desires, they compel us to progress and develop both as individuals and as integrated parts of our society. This is where the mechanics of happiness comes into play in your life and it is about setting a series of desires that are sustaining and, strangely enough, unattainable. Why is that? If you set yourself objectives that are attainable you are creating a Fixed Paradigm. Within the Fixed Paradigm there is a singular potential result. this means that the odds of disappointment are that much higher because setting yourself one potential outcome is limiting. The key here is to set yourself a series of staged progressive results, so instead of saying ‘I want X’, you say ‘I want X because it will allow me to Y and then I can Z’.
X, for example, is your dream home.
Y, for example, is the meditation space you have always wanted to create.
Z, for example, is the enhanced level of self knowledge you will attain.
Create a life of equations (Get X, Allow Y, Become Z) within a sequence of happenings rather than isolated fixed outcomes. Nothing occurs in isolation so include your objectives within the integrated fabric of your life and the Universe. This means they are connected to a whole network of possibilities. So while it is possible to have your dream home, self knowledge is something potentially unlimited and therefore a constant potential motivator in your life.
Your dream home, your meditation space, your knowledge of self is completely unique to you. Visualise the three now, one at a time and they are like a funnel that opens up; one leads to the next and they are like a progressive journey, a ladder that can move you always upwards and to a different level. Use different examples to colour and add texture to the different areas of your life and you will find that it becomes more of a ‘lived in’ experience than a ‘dreamed about’ experience and ultimately more rewarding. Something that is rewarding promotes greater satisfaction which is one of the components of happiness.