Life is Not About Being Happy

we typically assume that the ultimate aim of all our efforts is to have a happy life and judged on this basis many of us have to admit in the Silence of our minds that we're not really doing very well there's so much that every year and perhaps almost every day comes along to spoil our Ambitions there's a power struggle at the office there's a problem in our families our friends feel superficial or disengaged our anxieties don't Abate and our relationships are scratchy or distant our difficulties generate a basic layer of misery but then a secondary

layer is swiftly added to it caused by an underlying sense that our unhappiness represents a fundamental violation of life's true purpose not only are we unhappy we are unhappy that we are unhappy in the light of our tightly held belief in the possib possibility of a state of enduring satisfaction we're both sad and crushed that we have failed at the single most important goal open to all sane and ambitious humans it's in such moments of knotted misery that we may gain some relief from reframing our situation while we may not be able to overcome our

burdens themselves it does lie in our power to alter what these burdens have to mean to us we may not have to take them as proof of our stupidity or ill adjustment they can be signs that we're destined to have interesting lives rather than calm ones lives marked by a high degree of exploration psychological understanding and striving rather than settled certainty and equilibrium what we lack in terms of contentment we may make up for in terms of insight and experience we the often troubled ones the typically anxious ones the ones who frequently reach the end

of a day as exhausted and shaken as if we' crossed mountains we might judge our complicated situations with a new ruthful kind of Pride we belong to a distinctive and in its way estimable cohort we're always going to find a cloud on our Horizons we'll never spend more than half an hour before being visited by some kind of distemper we're never going to accept things as they are or make totally wise choices around love or work but this doesn't perhaps have to be the measure of everything we don't need to be constantly offended by our

agitations our day-to-day troubles don't have to be the yard stick by which we judge the value of Our Lives given where we've come from and how we're constituted we were never going to be happy in any obvious way but perhaps a good life can in the end be compatible with being fairly perturbed most days of the week but perhaps it doesn't matter that a relationship has failed once more perhaps it isn't appalling that our business doesn't Deliver Us the returns we might have had in our old job we've stretched ourselves we've learned to raise our

voices we've developed courage we don't have to see marks of grief and trouble as some kind of a violation of a pristine contract but as the logical and immovable consequences of our stubborn and subtle Natures interacting with the complexities of existence we're sometimes frightened into reorienting our lives by being asked to contemplate how we might feel about them from the vantage point of our deathbeds but if on this bed we were to look back at a roller coaster of emotions and events we might have got married for the fifth time recently we might smile to

ourselves and to the beeping of the heart monitor beside us say with wisdom and compassion it wasn't a calm life for sure it wasn't for the most part even a happy one but heaven knows it was a truly and properly interesting one and with this as our measure we might meet our end with all the satisfaction and self-acceptance we could hope for