I try to be open to recovery lessons wherever I am and found quite a few from watching Scrooge on TV a few weeks ago. When Scrooge and his nephew were having their argument over happiness, Scrooge said that the nephew “had no right to be happy because he was too poor.” You have to wonder what was holding Scrooge back from happiness, as the nephew correctly noted that Scrooge was rich enough, but still was not able to achieve a state of happiness.
I believe in Scrooge’s mind, he thought there is no state of being “rich enough” unless that would mean he possessed all the wealth in the world. He saw himself as still not rich enough to be happy because he did not posses every last penny in existence. While Scrooge raised the bar for his supposed level of happiness to an unobtainable standard by anyone, he also left no room for his continual state of happiness even if he was able to possess all the world’s wealth.
You see, even if scrooge somehow possessed all the money in the world, as soon as he would spend a dollar or even a penny of it he would not have all the money in the world any longer. Once Scrooge realized this point, his happiness would be non existent as he would be concentrating and grateful not on the rest of his remaining wealth, but on the missing penny he was not able to obtain that someone else possessed…when a man’s mind is concentrated he is blind.
People can confuse their net worth with their self worth. Sometimes wealthy people lose their fortunes and commit suicide. All their self worth was artificial and store bought. All their self worth was locked up in the bank vault and when it was gone they had no internal, real self worth to fall back on…nothing worth living for inside themselves.
They tell a story about the Buddha and his monks who were sitting by a road when a distraught farmer wanders by and asks them if they have seen any cows. The farmer goes on to say how miserable he is and tells the monks his sesame crop has failed and now all of his 10 cows have wandered off and without them he knows he will die.
The Buddha tells the farmer that they have not seen his cows and to look in another direction. When the farmer leaves, the Buddha tells his monks, “See how lucky you are that you have no cows, otherwise you would be suffering and in as much misery as that farmer.” These lessons from Scrooge and the Buddha reinforces in me to be happy “as-is” and to not put too many demands or prerequisites on my happiness and contentment.
When we put too many demands on our happiness, we are sure to fail sooner or later. When we realize that happiness is our birth right and we have the potential to be happy as-is, with no outside demands, we are surer to find it. Or as Thoreau wrote: “I am grateful for what I am and have. My thanksgiving is perpetual. It is surprising how contended one can be with nothing definite - only a sense of existence.”
When we wake up in the morning each day with a sense of gratitude, such as Thoreau wrote about, for just having the privilege to live life in that moment we will not be so dependent on all those “cows” we have tethered to ourselves with the false hope that they are required for our happiness.
When we have an engine that is too complex and has 1000 working parts and 1 part goes bad…the whole engine shuts down and 1 thing kills the other 999. So it goes with too many demands we place on ourselves for happiness and contentment…1 thing kills the other 999. Nowadays we can see this same mentality with how many people put their happiness on hold until sometime into the future, especially at Christmas.
How much of our life is wasted by living in the future. The other day I saw a billboard in November advertising “summer” fun. It was late fall and the ad was talking summer - just bypassing the upcoming winter season altogether. Our society makes it a point to discount the present moment and live for the future, as if nothing is worthwhile for us to live for in the hear and now. We need to balance the future and the past with the present to live healthy lives, but we also need to be aware of how much of our supposed happiness is being put on hold until some future date that never seems to come.
We tell ourselves we will be happy when we get our Masters Degree, but then our happiness is postponed until we get our Ph.D. and then we need a fancy car to be happy and then we need a job to pay for the car to be happy and then we need a marriage to be happy and then we need a house to be happy and then we need furniture to be happy and then we need to redecorate our house to be happy and then we need kids to be happy and then we need a boat to be happy and then we need a new job to be happy and then we need a vacation to be happy and then we need a bigger house to be happy and then we need to redecorate our bigger house to be happy and then we need sleeping pills to be happy and then we need retirement to be happy and then we need our kids and grand kids to visit more often to be happy and then we need a vacation house to be happy and then we need to sell our big house to be happy and then we need an operation to be happy and finally we put our last hopes for the happiness that has been eluding us our entire lives in our hope of getting the right coffin…The Cult of Next!
Someday we will run out excuses for not being happy right here and right now … in the present moment. Happiness is so elusive when it is always in the future. Mindfulness of the present moment is the cure for the cult of next. You can start by being mindful of your breath and everything you do whether eating, sitting, walking or standing - be mindful, grateful and happy in that moment.
Voluntary simplicity or simple living helped me build a less complex engine with fewer parts to break down. Instead of 1000 parts, I now have only a handful of parts. Whenever we put our happiness in people, places or things we will sooner or later be let down. Happiness starts from within us and cannot come from anyplace else. We can achieve a “diminishing of pain” from people, places or things, but cannot find true happiness in these material things as the pleasure found in such things is impermanent and can easily be turned into pain.
True happiness has no limits, whereas the aforementioned do have limits and also contain qualities of pain in them. I’ll give you a couple of quick examples. Eating a half gallon of ice cream quickly soon turns our mouth from feelings of pleasure into feelings of great pain. Through the suffering of change or impermanence our beautiful bride soon loses her physical beauty or our shiny new car gets keyed by a vandal and we can suffer greatly from both of these examples of change.
While both the new bride and new car do possess some qualities of pleasure in them, they also both contain qualities of pain as well, so nothing of this sort can lead us to perfect and true happiness. We must search for true happiness someplace else, but still balance the material world with our real spiritual needs. Happiness lies within us and not in things. True happiness and contentment can only be found in the spiritual realm which is limitless.
I’ll leave you with a timely quote from Brother David Steindl-Rast a Christian - Buddhist practitioner from his book “Gratefulness, the Heart of Prayer”
“Ordinary happiness depends on happenstance. Joy is that extraordinary happiness that is independent of what happens to us. Good luck can make us happy, but it cannot give us lasting joy. The root of joy is gratefulness. We tend to misunderstand the link between joy and gratefulness. We notice that joyful people are grateful and suppose that they are grateful for their joy. But the reverse is true: their joy springs from gratefulness. If one has all the good luck in the world, but takes it for granted, it will not give one joy. Yet even bad luck will give joy to those who manage to be grateful for it. We hold the key to lasting happiness in our own hands. For it is not joy that makes us grateful; it is gratitude that makes us joyful.”
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