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HOW TO LIVE A HAPPY LIFE
Life is something nobody’s particularly good at. Do you want proof? Nobody’s survived it yet!
There might be people who think that Bill Gates, with his billions, is happier than some friends of mine who live with three kids on a single medium wage and have not had a holiday since they got married. Yet they may not even want to compare themselves with the poor villagers in Ethiopia you may see sometimes on TV. Who’s happier? Does money make you happy? If not, what is? Is it health? Is it love? Is it seeing your children grow? Is it the sunset over your corn fields? Your late model Mercedes? The fact that you just took a painkiller for that toothache? Your football team winning the series? Political freedom? The three pounds you lost last month with the vegetarian diet? Your cake that didn’t get burned when you were on the phone? Your favourite piece of Bach? The fish you caught to feed your village? Finding the true name of God? The discrete readjusting of your tight underwear? Is it a combination of those and of many more?
To understand happiness, you need to seek it. To seek it, you must not have it. Once you get hold of it, it becomes irrelevant. One may say that happiness is living in the present, that fine, immaterial membrane between the past and the future, carpe diem. I don’t think so. How many times have you wished you weren’t there and then doing whatever you had to do and prayed that nightmare would end and you would wake up to the real, much better present?
To make it easier, let’s assume that time did not exist the linear way we are inclined to accept it*. Let’s just suppose that you don’t live on a straight line with many moments from birth to death, like beds on a string. Let’s say today is not any newer that that rainy day when your oxen cart got stuck in mud three winters ago. In my scenario today is not happening any earlier than they day of your funeral. Imagine there’s no universal time; you shouldn’t care about it anyway when you’re not around, because you are either long dead or yet unborn. The only good use for the past is to learn from it, rather from what we’ve been told by other guys the past might have looked like and this is very subjective stuff to say the least (think of the Bible as a story with many authors and many opinionated scribes working on it ages after things actually happened).
If the time wasn’t linear, all that’s important for you is the collection of moments that affect you directly, the ones that you have or will have a memory of or the ones who will mark you even without you remembering them. Think of a game the purpose of which is to score as many points as possible. The points are these little moments of your life. But how do you actually score? What’s the difference between a point you win and a point you loose? I’m no philosopher or anything like that but I think it’s intention. If you’re doing what you wanted to do and not what you have to because you were told so or because circumstances forced you, than you should be bloody happy and stop whinging about happiness, meaning of life and other crap!
I’ll give you an example of how to live life to the fullest, in happiness, as many moments as possible: It’s late in the afternoon. I just came home from work. I am hungry. My wife is asleep. She doesn’t work. The kitchen sink is full of dishes. The potatoes need peeling, cutting and boiling; the meat needs to be unwrapped, cut and fried. I shall empty the dish washer, fill it with dirty stuff, clean the kitchen throughout, dig the potatoes in the vegetable garden, drive about two miles to buy the meat, come back, peel the potatoes, wash them, put them in the pot, deal with the meat, cook it all and arrange it on a couple of large plates. It this then my intention to gently wake up my wife and present her with this bedside dinner.
Live like this and you’ll be forever happy!
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*Even in our simplistic way of understanding time, we should admit that it is not constantly linear. One day in a baby’s life, if the baby was born five days ago, means 20%, which is a huge proportion and could not be neglected. Yet a day in my life, now that I am about 100 years old, accounts for only around 0.00003%; I lived about 36 thousands of them, so each day means less; also think of think of hours, minutes, seconds. For a kid aged five getting that very toy today is more important than it is for you to get a pay rise the following financial year.