A while ago, I was brooding. I can’t remember why, so probably something insignificant. Whatever it was, it sent me into a spiral.
Happiness is a strange thing. For most of us it’s a fragile thing, too. Our base level of happiness cannot change much. Great events send us to great heights, tragic ones to great lows, but unless we suffer from mental illness we almost invariably return to a mean level of happiness.
Because of the up-and-down nature of happiness, I’ve recently pondered how one can attain true and constant happiness. I examined the “eudaimonia” of Aristotle (he suggests happiness comes from a balanced lifestyle); and the desire-denial of Buddhists (if you lack desires you cannot be disappointed).
But ultimately, these lifestyle changes proved too great for me. The demands of modern life prevent me from living Aristotle’s balanced life or from reasonably squashing desire.
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So if these cannot work for me, what can? The answer I came to is simple: gratitude.
Through gratitude, we realize what we possess. This is important, because many of us—myself included—tend to focus largely on what we lack. This sets us up for unhappiness. We attain one thing, dopamine floods our brain, and as soon as that thing brings happiness we become ungrateful for it and want something else.
Gratitude is powerful. It can change one’s focus from negativity and bitterness about “what I lack” to positive appreciation for “what I have.” This lends a sense of enablement and peaceful contentment. Bitterness is erased, and good will towards our fellow humans increases.
This predicament we find ourselves in—this thing called life—is innately valuable. Even at our lowest points, we can feel grateful for the simple miracle of life. As Bill Bryson wrote in A Short History of Nearly Everything, “Every atom you possess has almost certainly passed through several stars and been part of millions of organisms on its way to becoming you.”
The long journey of those atoms is remarkable. The fact that it has resulted in you and me, the fact that those atoms traveled all the way to this solar system, that all our ancestors—human or animal—survived long enough to reproduce, is nothing short of a miracle. This ephemeral spark of consciousness I’ve been granted may be an insignificant part of an incomprehensibly large universe; nevertheless, it is a part.
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Photo Credit: Getty Images
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This article was orginally published on Huffington Post. Reprinted with permission.