NOTES FROM THE AWARENESS: 350

Happiness arises from being in love with life.

Please discuss. How does this play out in life?

I’ll start us out. Everybody wants to be happy. No one expresses a conscious desire to be miserable. Ongoing happiness is at or near the top of our lists of goals for a good life.

Yet many of us struggle with being happy most of the time. Joy often eludes us; we may feel our happiness is tied to a condition—finding a romantic partner or getting married, having children, getting a better job, losing weight or becoming physically fit.

We can all come up with a list of items we feel would make us happy. It’s good to have dreams or goals, but having them doesn’t need to postpone our happiness. We can choose to be joyful right now with exactly what we have.

At any given moment, there’s at least one thing going right in our lives, even if it is simply that we are alive. Chances are that one of the things working well in our lives currently may have been a previous goal, one of the things we were certain would make us happy. So why not be happy right now?

Love drives our happiness. The list of things we believe would make us happy likely relates to feeling love—love for or associated with a romantic partner, caring for children or pets, having a rewarding career, or nurturing ourselves. If we’re willing to love all aspects of our live in the moment—the people and beings around us, our shelter, our livelihood, our bodies, the natural world—we don’t need to wait to be happy. Loving what is right now creates joy in everyday life.

Today’s message asks me to love liberally everything and everyone I encounter and everything I do. The more I love, the happier I will be. Just feeling love generates my happiness. The circumstances aren’t so very important.

How about you? What drives your happiness?