A college student once said "I don't need to be happy -- just successful"
It's an odd juxtaposition. She don't need to be happy -- just successful". She places one in opposition to the other. Students are today's expressions of tomorrow's practices. Their words can be the visible signs of the less visible struggles encountered by us all.
I have a memory from my own college years from one of a student's journal entitled "Why Aren't We Happy?" As the title suggests, we fell short of leading joyful lives. Yet at least happiness was still on the agenda. What underlies the tendency of many of us, like that success-seeking student, to give up genuinely trying?
I've often failed to enjoy Sunday because of my schedule on Monday. At bottom, it was simply anticipatory anxiety over the work of the week ahead - fear that there would be unexpected complications or that I would fail to measure up in some way. Usually, when Monday came, I did quite well. Much of what I worried about never happened.
Joy has its own moral underpinning. There's a completeness to joy that does not allow us to exclude our sense of the person we should be. Pleasure is certainly possible in less-than-honorable actions. But the experience of joy requires more; it is pleasure taken in worthy things.
True JOY requires choices that develop into habits that evolve into character. And that the work we can't delegate.
The essential first step is trying to live a less fearful life - one that avoids collapsing life's possibilities before exploring them. It entails welcoming uncertainty and comfortable incompleteness.
BitterSweet26_09
