My
wife and I celebrated our 11th anniversary by going to the movies
and dinner. When you have kids and a
babysitter, that’s about what you hope for.
But it’s fitting, because our first date revolved around a Woody Allen movie, and now we saw his latest one, Blue Jasmine.
Most of the country doesn’t get his movies. I’m not sure why. They always cover a meaty topic, and usually point out that love is hard to keep and life usually leads to loss and heartache – and then you die. Maybe the Jewish guy from New York intellect is not the issue – maybe he is too pathetic, sad, and whiny for America to embrace.
It’s hard to be happy all of the time, or for many, even some of the time. To be happy is to at least not be in pain or in need of something. But it’s not just a state of needing or wanting something or of avoiding bad things. To be happy is to be so for a reason, because something or someone makes you smile and feel good. If we just settle or remain ignorant, we’ll likely be happier, but not necessarily more satisfied and accomplished. But if we question everything and don’t remain satisfied for more than a moment, we’ll always feel unhappy and incomplete.
So
what will it take to achieve happiness?
Is it an addiction that makes us happy?
Do people abuse their body, mind or bank account in order to get high
and feel good? Is that why so many
prefer to drink, gamble, do drugs, overeat, womanize, etc.? They just want to escape reality and create a
state of fantasy.
I
thought that’s what books are for – to give is a new world or a new way of
looking at the world.
I’ve
been married for over 4,000 days and with each sunrise there is a new
opportunity to seek out happiness and though I’m still looking to reach certain
goals in life, I find a measurement of happiness in sharing my life with
someone who sees me in a way that no one else can.
Who
knows what makes any of us happy or why we so quickly go from happiness to
states of anger, depression or self-destruction. Nothing is static for long. We constantly move towards happiness – or
away from it – intentionally or unintentionally.
Most
often, for me, happiness is writing and creating. What makes you happy?
EXCERPTS FROM: The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of
Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth by M. Scott Peck, M.D.
“It is in this
whole process of meeting and solving problems that life has its meaning. Problems are the cutting edge that distinguishes
between success and failure. Problems
call forth our courage and our wisdom; indeed, they create our courage and our
wisdom. It is only because of problems
that we grow mentally and spiritually.
When we desire to encourage the growth of the human spirit, we challenge
and encourage the human capacity to solve problems… It is through the pain of
confronting and resolving problems that we learn.”
“Fearing the
pain involved, almost all of us, to a greater or lesser degree, attempt to
avoid problems. We procrastinate, hoping
that they will go away. We ignore them,
forget them, pretend they do not exist.
We even take drugs to assist us in ignoring them, so that by deadening
ourselves to the prim we can forget. We
attempt to skirt around problems rather than meet them head on. We attempt to get out of them rather than
suffer through them.”
“Most of us
operate from a narrower frame of reference than that of which we are capable,
failing to transcend the influence of our particular culture, our particular
set of parents and our particular childhood experience upon our
understanding. It is no wonder, then
that the world of humanity is so full of conflict. We have a situation in which human beings,
who must deal with each other, have vastly different views as to the nature of
reality, yet each one believes his or her own view to be the correct one since
it is based on the microcosm of personal experience. And to make matters worse, most of us are not
even fully aware of our own world views, much less the uniqueness of the
experience from which they are derived. “
“Discipline has
been defined as a system of techniques of dealing constructively with the pain
of problem-solving – instead of avoiding that pain – in such a way that all of
life’s problems can be solved. Four
basic techniques have been distinguished and elaborated: delaying
gratification, assumption of responsibility, dedication to the truth or
reality, and balancing. Discipline is a system of techniques, because these
techniques are very much interrelated.
In a single act one may utilize two, three or even all of the techniques
at the same time and in such a way that they may be distinguishable from each
other.”
“No problem can
be solved until an individual assumes the responsibility for solving it. When
character-disordered individuals blame someone else – a spouse, a child, a
friend, a parent, and employer – or something else – bad influences, the
schools, the government, racism, sexism, society, the ‘system’ – for their
problems, these problems persist.
Nothing has been accomplished. By
casting away their responsibility they may feel comfortable with themselves,
but they have ceased to solve the problems of living, have ceased to grow
spiritually, and have become dead weight for society. They have cast their pain onto society. The saying of the sixties (attributed to
Eldridge Cleaver) speaks to all of us for a time: ‘If you are not part of the
solution, then you are part of the problem.’”
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Brian Feinblum’s views, opinions, and ideas expressed in this blog
are his alone and not that of his employer, the nation’s largest book promoter.
You can follow him on Twitter @theprexpert and email him at brianfeinblum@gmail.com. He
feels more important when discussed in the third-person. This is copyrighted by
BookMarketingBuzzBlog © 2013
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