2024-06-23 What is happiness?

The speaker reflects on their struggle to find happiness and contentment in life. They discuss their ability to simplify things and live in the present moment, but food remains a challenge for them. The speaker finds that their desires and worries interfere with their ability to be happy. They contemplate the idea of a monastic life but ultimately feel that escape is not the solution. They acknowledge the need to confront and overcome challenges in order to find fulfillment. The speaker also mentions the limitations and obstacles they face in pursuing certain paths. They recognize that there is still much to learn in their journey towards happiness. I don't really know how to be happy. I mean, I can experience contentedness, peace. I understand how to simplify things so that without having external pull at me, I can have long periods where I can just be, I can just be me, feel what it's like to not need, to not want, to not desire much. Food is still an issue I'm working on. Sometimes the idea of eating something delicious is a more complicated issue rather than just eating simply, which I do much of the time. The desire to taste, even things I remember liking, can still be discovered to be less than I remembered if I go that way. In many ways, if I have something delicious, the desire to have it again is strong. So it makes more sense it shouldn't be that delicious. Often, when I think I'm going to enjoy something, I have it, and then I think I'm not going to have this again. It's not worth it. I don't get pleasure from it. And then I return back to my simple ways of muesli and boiled eggs, baked beans, things that are easy to have, require very little, but are tasty and they're cheap. So apart from that, most other things can be forgotten, let go. For long periods of time, I don't need to get clothes, although I can, and I don't have to pay for them. I can have a nice cooked breakfast, I don't have to pay for it. I can just have it. I don't have to book it. I don't have to explain why I am or am not there. I can just go. There's a lot of simplicity in my life, which I'm very grateful for. I'm comfortable, I'm warm and dry, I have privacy, and I have solitude. I can have darkness and silence. These are really important things for me. And yet, overall, I'm not happy. And it's not that there's something missing, although I guess it's possible there is, but it's not like I have a fixed idea of what's missing. It's just that perhaps it's not enough. Ultimately, I am not called upon to be loving or giving or caring or creative. I get to do all of those things occasionally, but not often. Maybe I need more of that. I am happier or happiest when I am of use, when I feel that I am using my skills, abilities, experience, either to benefit myself or to benefit others. From time to time, I benefit myself. An idea arises to make things just a bit better, make it work better, especially around how I live and the van, and occasionally others, making it simpler for them, making things easier, supporting them in a way that I find straightforward that they don't. But there's not much of that, because too much of that interferes with the other things I do. So what exactly is happy? Moments of mood, of emotion, of contentedness can seem happy, it can seem like happiness, but it doesn't stay the same, it doesn't continue as if once reached, it always is. I have concerns or anxieties, they interfere with happiness. Fears, worries, all interfere with happiness, because those things pull me down, take me away from that state. And we know that worries, anxieties, fears are all projections of an idea of the future that I don't prefer, and yet it doesn't exist and may never exist. Worrying about something seems to make experiencing it possibly twice, one in the worry and then in the experience, but often the worry never turns out to be the experience, but I still worried for essentially no reason. All of that interferes with contentedness, peace and ultimately happiness. So why do I do it? Why am I concerned with what the future might be, when I don't know what it will be, and whatever it is, then I'll deal with it as best I can. Sure, I can have a thought about the future and prepare a little bit to make what might happen easier, but if I get too far down that road, then I get stuck in the future rather than being in the present. The future doesn't exist, only the present does, and even that in itself isn't quite as real as it seems, because what is the present? It's always moving. What was now is always moving into the past, and so in this moment, this moment, while in a sense this moment never really changes, only the content of the moment does, if I am in this moment I can allow the content to change without being affected by it. If I see that this moment is changing and I have to be in a different moment, then I can be affected by it because I'm not stable. But what I think about affects me greatly. If I give energy to thoughts of worry, of future concern, of fear, I cannot be happy. I cannot be content. I cannot be okay in this moment because I'm saying I have to be concerned with what this moment will become if I'm not. If I'm not, I seem to have lost some of my ability to be accepting and allowing of things. I am a little more on edge. I am overly aware of, overthinking of things that for me now seem complicated where before they weren't and to others might not also be complicated. It doesn't take much for me to feel uneasy about having to deal with a world that for the most part I don't want much to do with. I can't seem to let it go. I seem to find I want some of it and I want to make use of some of it and the price for that is being in it. And yet in many ways I would prefer not to have to be in it. I would prefer not to need money, not to have to use it, but still feel my needs are met. Again the idea of monastic life seems a solution, what draws people to it, a zen, contemplative, meditative, letting go of the world. In a group of brothers, in a place of peace and calm where simple is the order of the day. And yet I can't move in that direction. I don't feel called to it. It seems more like escape and escape has never worked for me. It might seem like I have achieved something initially just because of the feeling of having let go of that which was there before. But soon issues arise that reveal that wherever I go there I am. There everything is that has created all of this issue. I take it with me. I'm not escaping from anything. Soon the thing I escaped to in order to avoid that which I wanted to escape from becomes the very thing I need to escape from again. I'm just going around the same circle, or at least that's how I used to be. I cannot say for certain that I would experience the same now, but of course that's quite likely. And so in many ways I have to be careful in which direction I head. I have to be sure of my reasons for doing so. To think about the idea of a monastic life is a life-changing event. Not that I'm unfamiliar with making life-changing decisions, but still. Giving up the van, giving up solitude, although I suspect monastic life gives you plenty of it, letting go of even the way I live for a much simpler life. I don't know. I'm guessing because I can't say I know for sure what exactly a monastic life would be. I only have some ideas of it. I know a monk, an ex-monk, an ex-Buddhist monk, who is still a Buddhist, 10 years, was in a monastery. We haven't had a lot of conversation about that time, but he left to start a family and come back into the world. He lives a life of service, but he was unable to stay, didn't need to stay any longer, needed to bring it into the world. I could say I have felt that too. I left the world for a while when I was on my travels, on my pilgrimage to India, and could have stayed, and yet had the feeling that when you get to that point where you're on the mountaintop, sitting in the proverbial loincloth, and all is peace, great. Now what? What now? What next? Yes, I can be here, but it doesn't feel like I can continue to just be here. There has to be something else. I have to do something as well as be here. And that feeling told me, go back, go back to where life is not easy, the challenge, face it, be in it, deal with it, learn from it, overcome it, transcend it, don't avoid it, don't find a cave and let go of the world. I don't know how those who do that stay doing it. I can't really imagine. I've never met one. I don't know who that person would be. I might like the idea of it, and in a sense, I live in a 21st century version of it. It's a movable cave, even though I don't move it, as most caves don't move either, and it's sometimes cold and damp, like a cave might be. But it's also comfortable and dry and warm in summer and seems to provide me with a solution I don't feel I could find anywhere else. I have looked, I have thought about it. It may not be the best solution or even the final solution, but it is the best I can come up with at this time. And I feel like when I last attempted to get closer to the idea of monastic living, just before I left my mum's, just before I went into the homeless state and the wandering state and the uncertain state, I knew I was trying to escape. And I would have done if I could have found a way to it, but even they were closed during the lockdown. So it was fortuitous in many ways, or at least synchronistic of life, to ensure I couldn't choose it, even if I wanted to. It wasn't available to me. Many of the options that I thought I might take, which in different circumstances I could have taken, were blocked from me taking because of the time that the choices were considered. And in a sense, it was life saying, no, you cannot go this way. They are escapes and life is helping me not to be able to take them because I might have. I was scared. I was worried. I was afraid. I didn't want to have to go into the world and experience it in the way I imagined it was going to be. It wasn't quite as I imagined. It very rarely is. But nevertheless, if I could have avoided it, I would have. There are still things, there are still feelings I get, even now, of wanting to avoid having to deal with certain things, so that when I do deal with them, I deal with them in a way that isn't fully committed. So in many ways, I discover obstacles, difficulties that exist because I have that state of mind. I make it harder for myself, even though I'm going to do it anyway. It would make more sense to just accept it. But I am struggling with that still. So I have more to learn. That's why the experience is still relevant for me. Not that I could ever choose to leave my physical body before it's time. But there's a reason why I'm still here. There's a reason why I haven't died of something that I didn't actually choose, a heart attack, because there's still more for me to experience in this life. Whatever might come, whatever I might be aware of, after, is irrelevant in many ways. I don't have to think about it. I don't have to believe anything about it. I don't have to have anything to do with it. It's none of my business. Anything that I have forgotten, that I will remember, will be remembered when it's time to remember it, and not before. And yet, it still feels like, while there is no pursuit of happiness, happiness can arise out of any situation in any given moment. And there are many times, as I say, that contented, peaceful feeling is happiness in many ways. I don't define it or really try to describe it as that in those moments, because I am that. Anything else would take me out of that, essentially. So I know I experience what feels to me like happiness, which to me is contented, peaceful presence. Freedom. I don't have to do anything. I don't want to do anything. And in that state I can do anything. I can do anything, in any moment, spontaneously. I just don't have to. And that, for me, is good enough.