I remember the deep sense of peace and tranquility I felt that morning. I was walking down the stairs to the living room, filled with a quiet, unpretentious happiness. Breathing was easy, steps were effortless. I remember the taste of that first delicious sip of freshly ground coffee.
The smell of jasmine from the forest surrounding the house wafted through the breeze, drifting in from the wide-open balcony doors. I sat there with a journal in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other, accompanied by the soft purring of my cat lying on my lap. Immersed in the sweet music playing from the vinyl record player, I gazed out at the lush jungle view in front of me. Effortless creativity and a deep appreciation for life washed over me. I felt peace. Complete serenity. In that moment, everything was simply … enough.
Ugh! How badly I craved to experience that again! A heavy cloud of nostalgia about this period of my life has cast a dark shadow over me. I wanted to have it back again! The same house, the same life, the same me, the same feeling of peace, I wanted it!
What happened? Why did I lose that?
As I reflected on this question, I realized I was missing the point. The more interesting question wasn’t what had happened, but why I felt the need to cling so desperately to that one moment of my life.
The answer was simple. When we feel good, we want to keep feeling good so we cling to the people, places, and experiences that we think have made us feel good. We don’t want to lose that feeling.
Especially if we have felt a profound sense of peace, love, and satisfaction in a given moment of our lives, now we know it’s possible, we’ve experienced how good life can get, and we don’t want to let go because we fear. We fear that we might never experience it again. We fear that life will be miserable or not as enjoyable as we knew it could be. So we cling. We try to force relationships to work, we cling onto people that once made us happy, and we try to stay in places and situations that we have outgrown hoping they’d somehow help us feel that same happiness again.
We so desperately try to cling onto what feels good and resist what doesn’t that we end up wasting our lives trying to adjust reality to fit our idea of happiness and we end up spending most of our lives in pursuit of an illusionary destination where everything will have life and happiness under control.
Not realizing that the only constant in life is change.
The only way to make sense of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.
Alan Watts
The Buddha says that desire is the root of all suffering.
The desire to have things different than they presently are. Reminiscing about the past, fantasizing about a different present, worrying about the future.
So how can we be happy? A simple yet one of the most puzzling questions for humanity.
It seems to me that the secret to a happy life lies in our ability to be attached to nothing but appreciative of everything in this present moment, continuously realizing that life is life because it’s always disappearing.
“To resist change is like holding your breath. To hold your breath is to lose your breath”.
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