A Feeling to Hold

Happiness. Who would have thought that such a word was so difficult to define. according to the oxford dictionary happiness is the state of being happy. okay….well what is happy? Besides an odd sounding word which is used to describe a feeling. In going back to the oxford dictionary the definition of happy is feeling or showing pleasure or contentment. Now if pleasure is defined as a feeling of happy satisfaction and enjoyment and contentment is defined as a state of happiness and satisfaction then is happiness not just a feeling felt at the end of something? So how do we hold on to a feeling that seems to be most prominent after we achieve some sort of goal. The feeling of happiness may be felt after helping another person with a simple act of kindness or doing drugs for some others. We are all such diverse creatures that the “what” of what makes us happy is too vast . What I want to know and hopefully share is the “how” of how do we hold on to a feeling that to most of us seems to be transient in nature.

Happiness to me is time slowing down and laying on the grass talking with my daughter on a nice cool day with no obligations to worry about. That is one reason I am not happy right now, time is flowing faster and faster as I watch my child grow every day. I can not control time , weather or my obligations as a provider living in a world that is designed to be very demanding. What I can do is control what I think about. I can Synthesize happiness as Dan Gilbert has explained. He sates in a very simple manner that “We synthesize happiness, but we think happiness is a thing to be found” I like that Dan Gilbert states this. I feel most people think they must find happiness….pursue it even. But we synthesize our feelings naturally and unnaturally. Naturally I would synthesize the feeling of happiness after I helped a person in need. But then what? Does our minds not wander and then subside in its stimulation? Our lives may be suddenly hit with a tragedy and we may find our selves in a state of lament that makes melancholy seem like a day at the amusement park. I lost my sister in a car accident when I was 18 and she was 19. This happened after growing up together in multiple foster homes and to put it in a simple manner; I very much wanted to die and the amount of time I spent acting truly reckless I am lucky that I didn’t. It is so easy to do nothing and as much as I wanted to just lay around and smoke pot and cry I didn't. I traveled and I became very aware of who I was and what I missed and what made me happy. I stood on top of an aztec pyramid in central Mexico. I drank dark beers in Ireland and had amazing conversation at a coffee house in London. I was discovering life and seeing other peoples versions of it and what made them happy. Obviously my sister made me happy and I was faced with loosing the only person that ever knew me. The only person that mattered. My big sister Aja Licastri. I found peace again after a lot of traveling , a lot of debachary and a lot of sex drugs and rock and roll as they say. Basically a lot of STIMULATION. Through stimulation I found happiness yet the feeling was and is so hard to hold onto. I was told by respectable friends of mine that I should look with in myself and just “be” in the “moment” . They were attempting to push me to the studies of buddha, which to explain in a simple manner buddhism is all about changing the way you see the world around you so that you can be more happy, and thus make other people feel more happy. I find a lot of similarities between the buddhist way of life and Dan Gilberts studies with synthetic happiness. He states “Human beings have something that we might think of as a "psychological immune system." A system of cognitive processes, largely non-conscious cognitive processes, that help them change their views of the world, so that they can feel better about the worlds in which they find themselves”. So it appears that happiness most definitely is not something to chase after much like a dog does its tail but a feeling that we create ourselves. We may reach the feeling of happiness via some sort of stimulation as I've discussed but most forward thinking people and concepts state that the actual feeling of happiness is controlled by our own inner selves or cognitive process. So happiness is a feeling of peace , calm and contentment and we control it.Then why are there so many heroine junkies that seek the same feeling yet neglect their children and slowly kill themselves day by day. Why are so many unhappy people in the world? I will tell you why: it is because controlling our cognitive process is hard and the world is full of suffering. So now happiness is seeming too actually be the elimination of suffering. And of course that is not possible on a large scale.

So what have we learned? That words used to describe happiness are just explanations of themselves, in other words. That happiness is a feeling that most of us experience after we complete something such as a good book or doing a good deed. That happiness is in fact based off of stimulation of both material and non material non cognitive processes. What I have yet to share with you is the answer to my question which was not what happiness is but how do we hold onto the feeling of happiness? The answer is we don’t. Life is a roller coaster of emotion. The birth of my daughter Aja Licastri was the happiest day of my life and every smile she bares is as equal to that day on September 09 , 2007. The worst day of my life was November 2, 2001 when my sister Aja Licastri was killed in a car accident. Every day, you see, I feel sad and I feel happy. I could even say that the happiness I feel was due in part from fear and sadness and the loss I have endured. Funny how the world works but funnier is they way our ego works. Are our egos not the true root of all personal thought process including the reasons we feel a certain way based off of personal past experiences? In philosophy the ego is a conscious thinking subject (ego is 19th century latin that is derived from the literal “I”) and so it seems the only way to stop thinking about the suffering and the obligations of life and what stimulates the feeling of happiness and how to obtain the feeling always is too control our ego and actually stop thinking of ourselves and change the “I” to “us”..