Some of our greatest insights or aha moments or light-bulb moments come as flashes of illumination. Others arrived after sinking in as lessons of maturity birthed 10 or 20 years prior. Even a few others arrive with freshly ground insight. Learned wholly with a fresh perspective on a old idea.
Any of the above insightful ways are taught in the crucible of life are valid for our experience and guidance.
Happiness is default rollercoaster
My happiness as does yours fluctuates for a myriad of reasons.
The world teaching is one of a broad spectrum of answers.
However Jesus sought others and taught them while tracking slowly on a narrow dusty path. Rarely straying more than 100 miles from Jerusalem.
While this may be true, we modern men and women learn entirely differently today. Most of us learn formally at school, college and university. Some travel overseas to gain wider knowledge. Most would agree with the statement that experience is the best way to apply and learn. From the school of hard knocks as it were.
Life is a progressive schooling or life- long learning.
So it should come with little surprise that many of us learn by having our knowledge engraved into our heart and mind. By repeating what we learned over and over again. Until the " message " fully sinks in. We can learn all kinds of things by rote,repetition and choice. It's been said that by personal interest is our better choice for retaining knowledge.
Abundance from Obedience
Author Dallas Willard believes that Jesus links a broad path to a life of abundance with travelling the narrow road of obedience. If happiness were exclusively link-
ed with financial abundance then Billionaires would have the greatest reason for happiness.
But as we all suspect happiness sometimes eludes the greatest, the richest, the ones with the most toys.
While watching a documentary on the slums of the Philippines I could not help observe that the very poor children were often the happier ones!
What was their secret?
How with so little were they able to smile, play laugh and love each other? While the obviously wealthy are subject to illness, calamity and " mental torment"
One could note that wealth didn't seem to confer happiness, at least not the freely given kind. Which it seemed the Filipinos exhibit or possess.
It would seem the more one has the unhappier one is? Could that be true?
Of course by that line of reasoning a middle course of happiness is achieved by not having the most nor by having the least. Can we really be mostly happy but not ecstatically so ? If we limit our purchases or materialism, take a middle road, then we are neither greedy nor paupers. But this makes it a game.Is happiness a foolish game?
It would seem a logical conclusion.
Not too much,not too little.
Greater minds than mine have thought so. The ancients, particularly the Greek philosophers thought so. The hedonistic, the stoic (and the devil sells both) supposed so. The range of thought available isn't small.
But my mind returns to the freely happy playful chjildren whose smiles are imprinted upon my heart.Including children of Syrian refugees in a more recently viewed documentary and in real life.Though they seemed more guarded in their play.
So little, yet so happy.
Is there a secret here to be revealed? Or have Western societies lost their way temporarily? What about the other societies,have they lost their way as well?
The Ancient of Days has revealed to us his ways. Opening his book is all it took for me a half century ago. Could knowledge equal happiness?
Could happiness be learned like knowledge?
Is happiness learned by choice?
Or is happiness always organic?
Is happiness a decision?
The foundation of Western civilization was a combination, a mix of the Judeo-Christian and Greek and Roman traditions. But I hastily add that like Paul the great Apostle states, I haven't arrived or achieved such open, lasting perfect happiness. But i can be content. However I haven't left the narrow path often fraught with no easy labour, loss and suffering climbing heaven-ward to reach the sublime. A goal that all seek,when awaken from sleep.
The Ancient of days has revealed to us his ways. All it took was one book.
