The defining moment in my life that shifted the way I was thinking...and brought me to ubuntu.
Great question. Tough to answer.
In the sense of living and breathing and working and playing.I love D.C. and found these pretty valid...
What kind of meaning should you seek? Here are the standard choices. Consider them as they apply to you.
Work
Family
Love
Service
Giving
Personal growth
Hobbies, recreation
Education, study
Creativity
Friendship
Most people select a few of these, primarily family, friends, hobbies and work, which they hope will be enough. But what about the higher values, which will bring far more lasting, secure happiness? Among these I'd select love, giving, service and personal growth. If you leave these out, your happiness can be snatched away by losing your job or your friends. You run the risk of becoming an empty nester as your family grows up and moves away. Establish a higher purpose early in your life—preferably starting today—and your future won't be so vulnerable to change.
2. Inner happiness. We hear this phrase a lot, to the point that it becomes meaningless. All those models on TV look as if they gained inner happiness from a slim waist, the right makeup, good hair and being young. Real inner happiness is easy to measure, however. If you can sit by yourself, doing nothing to distract yourself, needing no one, and still feel happy, then you have achieved inner happiness. It is marked by feeling safe, knowing that you are enough, finding a core of peace and calm. I sometimes put all these factors into a single phrase: You are truly happy if being here is enough.
3. Focus on relationships instead of consumerism . America is a consumer economy driven by insatiable appetites for whatever is bigger, better, newer and more expensive. You and I aren't going to change that fact, but we can see through the glossy promise that consumerism makes you happy. It doesn't. Nor do heaps of money. Studies show that after a person has achieved enough money to cover life's necessities, the returns begin to diminish. The very rich are not happier than the rest of us, nor are winners of lotteries. In both cases, a huge surplus of money tends to bring out psychological flaws such as anxiety, greed and a fear of not having enough.
If you define yourself by what you own, trouble lies ahead, because you have left a hole where a self needs to be. It is far more important to have a secure, loving relationship that mirrors your true self. I know that this sounds much harder than buying a new computer or a faster car, because it is. But relationships can bring inner fullness; expensive things simply wear out.
4. Stop being distracted. Distractions are nice for whiling away the time, but the more hours you spend bent over a video game or the Internet, the less time you have for things that matter. All of us know that having a full heart is important, but it requires time and attention. As children, we counted on our parents to be warm-hearted. Secure in that knowledge, we could play and be carefree. But when you grow up, no one can replace your own heart and its needs. By "heart," I mean emotional fulfillment, compassion, kindness, bonding—the whole emotional core of life. Distractions will never bring these things to you, and they are among the most necessary aspects of a happy life.
5. The place beyond fear. Modern life is marked by instant communication and global outreach. These are good things, but they also make everyday life seem much more fearful. We live in a world where total strangers living far away can harm us. There is no place safe from fear—except inside. You can't do much to reduce the causes of external worry; bad people and bad things have always been with us. But you can take care of your own tendencies to be afraid, worried and anxious. There is a place of safety inside, and if you can find it, you will find the kind of happiness that bad people and bad things cannot shake.
6. Peace instead of stress . We all know that life is stressful, but many people think of stress as an outside element such as bad traffic, pressure at work, kids who won't pay attention, etc. Actually, stress is a response. How you react to the outside world is far more important than any outside stressor.
There is a stress-free zone inside you, a place of peace. When you find this inner core of the self and learn to know it, external stress will not make you its prey. I don't mean that you zone out and contemplate your navel, to use the old cliché about Buddhism (which was never navel-gazing to begin with). When you find your own peace, outside stressors will still exist, but you will have a far different response to them. You will know what to fix, what to put up with, what to walk away from. Those are very basic decisions if you want to maintain your own happiness.
7. A happy body based on wellness . As part of the American way of life, people wait until they are sick before turning to fix-its, meaning drugs or surgery. We ignore wellness and prevention after decades of being told how valuable they are. Their value hasn't diminished. In fact, your body wants you to be happy and is constantly sending signals of either contentment or distress. By turning our backs on our bodies, we are depriving ourselves of a major ally in the campaign to find happiness.
I don't mean that you should get a gym card and start jogging, although both are positive lifestyle changes. Your body doesn't need to be thin, fit and beautiful to make you happy. It needs to talk to you, and you need to listen. All the things you can do to find inner happiness require the body; the mind isn't living in a separate balloon. You will never stick with the best regime of diet, exercise, stress reduction and meditation until your body is comfortable with it.
Wellness is a mind-body alliance. What I'm proposing is that you form such an alliance. Distractions take us away from our minds; consumption takes us away from our bodies. We have taken up these things because mind and body aren't at peace with each other. Yet mutual peace is their natural state. Once you know that, you can go beyond superficial images about what makes for a good body. A good body is one that makes you happy because it supports you in wholeness.
In the end, wholeness is the keyword if you want the kind of happiness that can't be taken away. Having spent so much time trying to be happy the old way—and not truly succeeding—we should realize that there is a new way. It could change your life right now.
Love
Service
Giving
Personal growth
Hobbies, recreation
Education, study
Creativity
Friendship
Most people select a few of these, primarily family, friends, hobbies and work, which they hope will be enough. But what about the higher values, which will bring far more lasting, secure happiness? Among these I'd select love, giving, service and personal growth. If you leave these out, your happiness can be snatched away by losing your job or your friends. You run the risk of becoming an empty nester as your family grows up and moves away. Establish a higher purpose early in your life—preferably starting today—and your future won't be so vulnerable to change.
2. Inner happiness. We hear this phrase a lot, to the point that it becomes meaningless. All those models on TV look as if they gained inner happiness from a slim waist, the right makeup, good hair and being young. Real inner happiness is easy to measure, however. If you can sit by yourself, doing nothing to distract yourself, needing no one, and still feel happy, then you have achieved inner happiness. It is marked by feeling safe, knowing that you are enough, finding a core of peace and calm. I sometimes put all these factors into a single phrase: You are truly happy if being here is enough.
3. Focus on relationships instead of consumerism . America is a consumer economy driven by insatiable appetites for whatever is bigger, better, newer and more expensive. You and I aren't going to change that fact, but we can see through the glossy promise that consumerism makes you happy. It doesn't. Nor do heaps of money. Studies show that after a person has achieved enough money to cover life's necessities, the returns begin to diminish. The very rich are not happier than the rest of us, nor are winners of lotteries. In both cases, a huge surplus of money tends to bring out psychological flaws such as anxiety, greed and a fear of not having enough.
If you define yourself by what you own, trouble lies ahead, because you have left a hole where a self needs to be. It is far more important to have a secure, loving relationship that mirrors your true self. I know that this sounds much harder than buying a new computer or a faster car, because it is. But relationships can bring inner fullness; expensive things simply wear out.
4. Stop being distracted. Distractions are nice for whiling away the time, but the more hours you spend bent over a video game or the Internet, the less time you have for things that matter. All of us know that having a full heart is important, but it requires time and attention. As children, we counted on our parents to be warm-hearted. Secure in that knowledge, we could play and be carefree. But when you grow up, no one can replace your own heart and its needs. By "heart," I mean emotional fulfillment, compassion, kindness, bonding—the whole emotional core of life. Distractions will never bring these things to you, and they are among the most necessary aspects of a happy life.
5. The place beyond fear. Modern life is marked by instant communication and global outreach. These are good things, but they also make everyday life seem much more fearful. We live in a world where total strangers living far away can harm us. There is no place safe from fear—except inside. You can't do much to reduce the causes of external worry; bad people and bad things have always been with us. But you can take care of your own tendencies to be afraid, worried and anxious. There is a place of safety inside, and if you can find it, you will find the kind of happiness that bad people and bad things cannot shake.
6. Peace instead of stress . We all know that life is stressful, but many people think of stress as an outside element such as bad traffic, pressure at work, kids who won't pay attention, etc. Actually, stress is a response. How you react to the outside world is far more important than any outside stressor.
There is a stress-free zone inside you, a place of peace. When you find this inner core of the self and learn to know it, external stress will not make you its prey. I don't mean that you zone out and contemplate your navel, to use the old cliché about Buddhism (which was never navel-gazing to begin with). When you find your own peace, outside stressors will still exist, but you will have a far different response to them. You will know what to fix, what to put up with, what to walk away from. Those are very basic decisions if you want to maintain your own happiness.
7. A happy body based on wellness . As part of the American way of life, people wait until they are sick before turning to fix-its, meaning drugs or surgery. We ignore wellness and prevention after decades of being told how valuable they are. Their value hasn't diminished. In fact, your body wants you to be happy and is constantly sending signals of either contentment or distress. By turning our backs on our bodies, we are depriving ourselves of a major ally in the campaign to find happiness.
I don't mean that you should get a gym card and start jogging, although both are positive lifestyle changes. Your body doesn't need to be thin, fit and beautiful to make you happy. It needs to talk to you, and you need to listen. All the things you can do to find inner happiness require the body; the mind isn't living in a separate balloon. You will never stick with the best regime of diet, exercise, stress reduction and meditation until your body is comfortable with it.
Wellness is a mind-body alliance. What I'm proposing is that you form such an alliance. Distractions take us away from our minds; consumption takes us away from our bodies. We have taken up these things because mind and body aren't at peace with each other. Yet mutual peace is their natural state. Once you know that, you can go beyond superficial images about what makes for a good body. A good body is one that makes you happy because it supports you in wholeness.
In the end, wholeness is the keyword if you want the kind of happiness that can't be taken away. Having spent so much time trying to be happy the old way—and not truly succeeding—we should realize that there is a new way. It could change your life right now.
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