“Most men pursue pleasure with such breathless haste
that they hurry past it“
– Kierkegaard
The pursuit of happiness, pleasure, enjoyment, etc. seems to consume us. We weigh our actions against whether they make us content or discontent. We gauge our plans against whether they improve our lot or degrade it. Constantly we are in the midst of a journey toward an ideal that, unbeknownst to us, cannot be achieved. It’s not that we can’t be happy…in the sense that we can experience it. We simply can’t be happy in the sense that we can sustain it. We can’t exist in the state any more so than we can exist in a state of sorrow. There are stimuli which act upon us, stimuli that bring about a feeling of happiness or sadness, joy or dread, excitement or melancholy. Where we tend to veer off course is when we lose sight of the little things that can actually bring about the experience of happiness because we aren’t content with the level of happiness such things provide. It’s not meeting our ideal of happiness so we discard it. This is a devastating mistake.
Pleasure can be found in the simplest, most banal of things. Happiness can exist in a gesture as mundane as your dog laying his head on your lap or your daughter glancing you a half-smile from across the room as she’s fervently, squinty-eyed focusing on her colored pencil Minnie Mouse masterpiece. But these simple doses are not what we strive for and as such, are not factored into the calculus of our unabating pursuit. We want so badly for the happiness we’re searching for to be a utopian state of perpetual existence that we blow by the incessant minutiae of happiness our life affords us every hour of every day. If we could only learn to appreciate these little gifts for what they are, we would realize that the aggregate pleasure of our lives actually drastically outweighs the aggregate pain of our day to day experiences…just not in an idealized, perpetual way.
Try to find the happiness in the little things today. I promise this simple perspective shift will pay profound dividends as you look back and gauge your overall contentedness. You don’t need to search for happiness or even strive for it. Happiness is all around you, you just need to be willing to slow down and feel it.
