Live. Laugh. Love. Learn

Inner peace: a multifaceted undertaking. ♥

Live. Laugh. Love. Learn.

PUTTING it AlL together

Gretchen Rubin introduces The Happiness Project with a simple quote: “There is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being happy.” Once upon a time, Robert Louis Stevenson shared this wonderful adage with the world and I am among the privileged who have come across it. Now, I have no idea who this learned individual is. Heck I don’t even know if he is still alive! But if I can say one thing with certainty it is this: his quote inspired me. It was neither due to the beautiful wording nor the fitting way in which he made his statement but simply because of the plain truth that underlies it. Two distinct ideas jumped at me after I read this quote: (1) the majority of people are only relatively happy and (2) I am amongst this bulk of people.

As I allowed this realization to sink in, one question nagged me: why do we cheat ourselves of complete happiness? The answer: we as human beings have a tendency to settle. Once we feel the impression of happiness in our lives, we become complacent. We stop questioning, we stop prying for deeper meaning, and we accept what we believe is the real definition of happiness: financial stability, a beautiful home, expensive clothes, killer shoes, longer hair, whiter teeth, bigger biceps; the list goes on. One key idea, however, prevails: what the majority of us value is superficial and this explains why the average person is only “pretty happy.” Our happiness is too measured by things that bring fleeting moments of satisfaction. For instance, we get the latest version of the iPhone and we are ecstatic. But then what? There is nothing more. What we feel as happiness is only temporary joy, and it fades.

Secondly, I realized that I was committing this crime. I was both a perpetuator and a victim of my own foolishness. If I felt incomplete it was by own doing, by my own complacency. I had settled and I was no longer satisfied because I had stopped reaching for a higher standard of happiness; I had stopped stretching towards greater heights of fulfillment. And so in reading Stevenson’s quote, I experienced an inception that planted within me a single objective: to reexamine my life so that I could graduate from being a “pretty happy” person. I was catalyzed—my interest in being happier irreversibly piqued—and as I began to read The Happiness Project, my desire to be happier was dramatically bolstered. 

Reading Gretchen’s account wrested out some ghosts of my teenage past. It turns out that the vestiges of my happiness mission go way back to my sophomore year in high school. My trajectory began in the oddest of places: my English class. As we were reading the Baghavad Gita, I was introduced to an ideal that has since flourished within me and that continues to walk with me today: inner peace. The concept in itself was charged; its depth and complexity captivated me—and  as I began to build bridges between the principle of inner peace and happiness, I became haunted by an ominous feeling: a sense of inadequacy. My life was incomplete and I could feel it. Something was missing but I could not identify it. This past year has only amplified this cryptic sensation and as the breadth of my knowledge on inner peace has been expanded by topics like the law of attraction, achieving harmony with the self and the universe, and experience as the wellspring of fulfillment, my want to master the concept has concurrently grown.

Today I can confidently say that something is brewing in my life, like a mysterious plot rising steadily to its climax. It is no coincidence that all of the literature I have read over the past two years have been so entwined, all of them seemingly rooted in the central ideal of happiness. Maybe happiness is a universal theme and is translated differently in varying types of texts. But the ways in which I have interpreted these texts and immediately connected them to my life is what has made them particularly valuable to me. The epitome of these coincidences had to have been my encounter with The Happiness Project. My life is currently subject to something that Gretchen calls “cosmic harmony.” The universe is speaking to me—or more so responding to me—and I am straining as hard as I possibly can to listen to it. In reading Gretchen’s account I have undergone a great deal of reflection and I have established that I refuse to continue to be both the criminal and the victim of my dissatisfaction, to be caught in the vicious cycles of my own sense of inadequacy. I want clarity, definition, purpose, genuineness, and depth in my life. I want to experience, to reach fulfillment on all levels—physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual. This project may take years, but something tells me I am in it for the long haul. As Gretchen likes to say, “When the student is ready, the teacher appears.”

I am happy to announce that I have identified the leading principle in my trajectory: inner order to generate outer order. In my quest I want to become the architect of my own peaceful frame of mind from which I will be able to guide myself to live, to laugh, to love, and to learn with maximum effort. My ultimate goal is to live not only a good life but one that is right for me. I want to grow on my own terms, to live up to the highest ideal of happiness, while learning how to be the best version of Mathilde that I can possibly be. As Erasmus once said, “The chief happiness for a man is to who he is.” I do not want to envy others. I want to be none other than myself and to be unswervingly true to myself by upholding self-improvement as my life motto. 

          I have also taken into consideration that my quest may never end. For as long as I can recall I have never been good enough; I could always be better—and better has never been enough. So why stop now? Happiness is a constant journey, not a destination, because the second we feel that we have reached it, we become bored and proceed to aim for a higher level of satisfaction.  Complacency is the handicap of total happiness; I refuse to be complacent.

Cheers to living life to the fullest!

-Sign MAPL∞