Living with Assumptions

The time came when I gave up on being happy.  It was just too much to expect and not that rewarding.  If I could write well this morning, there would be some metaphorical image here, something to make you feel the emotion.  But I don't have it in me today.  I am too distraught.  Perhaps one day I'll come back and add that thing that is so needed.  To continue, though, I thought that giving up the desire to be happy would make life more bearable.  I didn't expect to be unhappy, of course.  I just got tired of working and hoping for the other.  What is happy anyway, I wondered?  What do we learn from happiness?

The answer to the first question is rather obvious on an experiential level.  We just know it when we feel it.  On a scientific level, we know there are certain chemical changes in certain parts of the brain.  For the most part, none of this is under our control.  But scientists have measured brain activity during the meditation of serious practitioners, and they found that they were able to simulate some of the brain changes measured in "happy brains" during meditation.

The answer to the second question, what do we learn from happiness, has always seemed to me to be "nothing."  It is a nice state, but it is without conflict, and I've held that we learn nothing without conflict.

But today I have to challenge my use of the word "learn."  To what sort of "learning" am I referring?  Didn't scientist learn that brain activity changes in happy people without having to experience conflict?  That only required a certain kind of observation and measurement.  Obviously, it is not the sort of learning of which I speak.  And I wonder today if I have not put too much emphasis on this other kind of learning, whatever it is.  Moral?  Spiritual?

Something has happened that has put me in a tailspin.  Nothing moral or spiritual.  It is purely physical.  Telling people about it does no good, of course.  They cannot help.  And for the most part, people feel something worse than pity when you impose the information on them.  They have not desired the information, and they only wish for some simple solution.  "Do you need some aspirin?"  This is not their fault, of course.  The telling has left them in a helpless situation.  It is best not to share these things.  You are in agreement just about now having had this imposed upon you.  "Is there anything I can do?"

And so I think this morning of those monks, sitting eyes half closed, ridding their minds of the devils and demons waiting to rush in.  Even in the worst of times, perhaps, happiness (or it's cousin tranquility) is achievable.  And there are moral or spiritual lessons to be learned there.

At least that is today's assumption.


*(Send no blessings nor regrets, please.  It is nothing terminal)