High on Happiness

Posts Tagged ‘Meaning’

In the comfort of friends, life takes on meaning.   Joys shared are joys brightened.  Shared troubles lose some of their sting.

Friends give lie to the illusion that we are separate, that we walk through life alone. They assure us that we matter and that our hearts are tied to other hearts that know that how we love and know what we bear.

In their company, we unfold our wings and dare to fly.  When we fall, they are there, telling us to rise again.

They encourage us to hope, and when our own hopes fade, freely lend us some of their own.  They support our dreams—even the outlandish ones.  They still our fears with their presence at our sides.

Friends are the mirrors of our souls.  Through their eyes, we glimpse our own beauty and understand that it is true.   And so we love them, reflecting their beauty to them in return.

And thus we prosper and flourish, comforted and gladdened.  We become more real and our lives become more precious, all through the grace of good friends.

Initially the lilacs chose the Earth mission because it sounded like such an adventure.  The place was known, after all, for its challenges and extremes.  Well, that, and for its incredible beauty.

They had to undergo rigorous testing before they were approved.  Successful candidates for the program had to be resilient and hardy, able to withstand wide-ranging contrasts of heat and cold, to survive in rich and poor soils, to stand against buffeting winds and pummeling rains.  Most of all, they had to have strong hearts.

During their first few years of the mission, they found out why they had to be so strong.  The planet’s reputation for challenges and extremes was well deserved, they learned; they were indeed put to the test.  It was everything they could hope for in an adventure.

As for the beauty of the place, it was indescribable, and the lilacs were filled with bliss just to have a part in its unfolding.

As the years passed, the lilacs discovered something more.  So many of the people who lived on earth were lost, and confused, and filled with pain.  They had, for the most part, forgotten who they were and so they fought with one another and caused each other great distress and pain.  It was heart-wrenching to watch.

How meaningful it was, then, for the lilacs to discover that they had the power, simply by expressing their own nature, to bring the humans comfort with their beauty, and to heal their spirits with their perfume.  It gave the flowers a sense of purpose that elevated their souls and made every challenge worthwhile.  They had dreamed of adventure, and discovered, in service, pure joy.

I was running a little late as I left the house this morning.  But as I was getting in my car, I glanced at the hillside and the light took my breath away.

“The morning of the last snow,” I thought to myself.  “Tonight it will be gone.”  So, late or not, I took time to capture the moment with my camera.

Five hundred and eighty days ago, I started writing this blog and taking daily photos.  Back then, I was asking myself the question, “Why am I so happy now?”  I had no idea where the question would lead me.

But this morning, as I stood in the cold, my heart soaring at the sight of morning sunlight brushing the treetops and laying in pale golden swaths across the last of the snow, I realized that I have a few answers.

And the primary one, the one I most want to share with you is this:  Do that which brings you joy.

Take time to think about the things that give you a sense of satisfaction, that make your life more meaningful, that bring you pleasure.  Then find ways to do the best of them more often—no matter what it takes, no matter how challenging it may be to make room for them.  Let them become a central part of your days.

When you commit yourself to being led by joy, to honoring those things that unlock the happiness within you, you’re expressing more fully who you truly are and living more authentically.

That which brings you joy will lead you more deeply into yourself and bring you rewards you can’t, in the beginning, even imagine.  They’ll release your talents and teach you to thrive.  They’ll connect you more fully to life and enrich your days.  They’ll expand your spirit and lead you wonderful discoveries, within and without.  And your happiness will spill out into the world and make it a more joyful place for us all.

So take some time to think about that which brings you joy, and give yourself to those things.  They will, I promise, give back to you in great measure.

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Every hue its place in the rainbow, every note has its place in the song.  Every motion, every season, every leaf and bug and star plays its part in the magnificent unfolding.

Even those things that live in the darkness.  The things we call vile; the things that repulse.  They, too, play their part, although you must stand at a great distance to see it and look through clear eyes.

Nothing goes to waste.  Nothing is unused or in vain.  Everything serves; everything supports and contributes. Every thought.  Every gesture.  Every breath.  Every word.

A hand larger than we can conceive weaves it all together into one endless song according to laws too high for us to comprehend except in the deepest reaches of our being.  And they guide us and shape us, as they do with all things, so that we, too, are a part of great harmony of it all, whether we know it or not.

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“We live only to discover beauty.  All else is a form of waiting.” ~Kahlil Gibran

When beauty spreads itself before you, pause and breathe it in.  Pause, setting aside your thoughts and your doings, and let it shower you with its radiant and animating light.  Let it sing to you its song of exaltation.  Let it flow molten into the depths of you, quickening your soul with its sparks of wonder, its flame of truth.

This is a mystical training.  For beauty’s purpose is to reflect to you the essence of the light within your own heart.  It is life, dancing naked before you, taking the form of a bird, a face, a leaf, a river, a sky.  And the more deeply you see it, the more you come to understand that you, too, are its child and its expression.

Immerse yourself in it.  Ride its tender waves to the edges of the cosmos, to the pure, still point within.  Let it guide and teach you.  “When you reach the heart of life,” the poet Gibran declared, “you shall find beauty in all things, even in the eyes that are blind to beauty.”  This is its ultimate lesson.  May it be your destiny and goal.

The showers began in the wee hours and continued throughout the day.  Coming as they did on a Saturday, no doubt they caused some consternation.  It’s the season, after all, for weddings and picnics in the park.  But for me, it was a day of raining joy.

With the perfect excuse to postpone my errands, I brewed a pot of tea and parked myself at my computer to write.  I’m working hard on my imminent launch of Positive-Living-Now, a sister website for High on Happiness, where you’ll find a growing wealth of resources for building more meaning, joy and satisfaction into your own life.   (You can sign up right now to be in on the launch.  Check it out!)

As much as I appreciate and enjoy my day job, it does gobble up my energy and time.  To have an entire day to spend on my key projects is bliss.  So today I reveled in my writing and my graphic arts.

To have meaningful personal goals makes of your life a joyous journey.  They provide such a sense of direction and purpose.  They illuminate your path. They call you forward and stretch you to learn in their service.

When you have meaningful goals, they pull you to tap your best strengths, to hone your abilities, to risk leaps you wouldn’t otherwise have dared.  They keep you going when you’re weary and discouraged.  They tantalize and torment you with problems to solve, and so you’re never bored.

You find yourself getting lost in them, losing all sense of time because you’re so engaged.  And when at last you set them aside for the day, the satisfaction washes over you as if it’s been raining joy.

Down the road, we’ll talk about how to find a genuinely meaningful goal at Positive-Living Now.   For now, ask yourself what you really love doing, what you would most want to create in your life—even if you have no idea how you would find the time or the means for doing it.  Then just lightly play with your dream from time to time.  See where it leads you.  See what possibilities float into your awareness, what options appear that could move you toward a clearer vision of the shape it could take, the steps you might make in its direction.  It all begins, after all, with a dream.

Grab one.  Nurture it a little.  Watch how it grows, and how it grows you.  See if you don’t wake up one morning watching joy clouds moving your way.

The little pine grew surrounded by mighty elders whose tops brushed the sky and whose branches were homes for squirrels and birds and bugs of every description. She loved the way the wind made music in their boughs and showered their red needles at her feet.  She loved the sparkling fireflies that came in summer to dance from the ground to the stars above.

But most of all, she loved the quiet nights when the elders would whisper the fantastic tales of The World Beyond that they learned from the visiting birds.

Much of it was beyond the understanding of the little pine, and she had no way of knowing whether the stories were make-believe or real.  But they were grand stories either way, and as the seasons passed and her understanding grew, the elders were able to explain what the fables meant, and stories took on great beauty and increasing meaning.

The stories the wrens told differed somewhat from the ones the robins told, and theirs differed from the owls’ version in many details.  But one year a great eagle had built its nest in the top-most branches of an elder who dwelt high up the distant slope, and it wove the bits of the birds’ stories into one magnificent piece.  Counsels of elders had studied the eagle’s tale through the ages, and passed it down as clearly as they could to the all the trees in the forest.

Just as each tree was a distinctive expression of life, they said, with its own sap and wood, its unique pattern of bark, needles and branches, all together the pines and their leafy cousins were part of a larger community of life known as a forest.  And beyond the forest lay other beings, known as plains and mountains and deserts and seas.  And altogether, they made up a whole called a planet, and her cousin was the moon, and her husband the sun.

That was all the eagle knew for certain, from its travels.  But it believed, the elders said, that the sun and moon and planet were part of yet another whole that was part of another and so on, forever.  And its nature was joy, for the space that bound it all together was made of love so vast and deep and all pervasive, that even the tiniest ant who crawled across the pine’s needles felt its power. And every bit of it mattered and was needed to fully express love’s song.

That, the elders told the young pine, was the importance of being exactly who she was.  She was needed for the love to express exactly the note of joy that she embodied, and in all of creation, she alone could sing it.

Oh sure, just what you wanted to hear, right smack-dab in the middle of the biggest party time of the year!  Here you are, stuffed full of cookies and fruitcake, (okay, maybe not fruitcake) and laying in the goods for the big New Year’s Eve bash, and you’re supposed to think about self-discipline?  Good one, hey?

Well, I only want you to think about it long enough to give the boys in the back room something to chew on.  (That’s what I call that clever part of you that delivers new ideas and solutions to you.  It’s a specialized division of your subconscious, if you will.)

Here’s the deal.  Come January 1 (And it’s coming fast!), you’re going to have this notion that you’re going to adopt some so-called resolutions and make a new, improved you of yourself.   You know, the one that’s finally going to be buff, and organized, and get the garage cleaned out and stuff.

That’s cool.  If that’s what really spins your wheels.  But if it’s only what you think you should do, forget it.  I happen to be something of an expert on goal-setting, and the one thing you absolutely have to know about choosing a goal is that it MUST be personally meaningful to you.  In other words, you have to really care about it and know why you want it.   If you’ve got that, you’ve got all you need to get there.

Now chances are, unless you have really been thinking about it, you only have some vague thoughts about what you would really like to achieve in the coming year.   If you know, great.  If you don’t, why not let your resolution be something along the lines of taking a couple weeks to figure it out and then get into gear.

Either way, once you have a fairly clear idea of what aspect of your life you want to develop, make a commitment to it.   That’s where self-discipline comes in.  It means you give yourself to your new direction whole-heartedly, that you’ll pick yourself up and start again when you backslide, that you’ll keep on keeping on no matter what, that you’ll learn and apply and practice everything it requires of you.

That’s where the happiness enters.  When you wake every morning knowing that your day has purpose, that you have a fresh opportunity to move in the direction you have chosen, your life has meaning.   And there’s nothing like a meaningful life to make you the happiest kid on the block.  I guarantee it.