Acclaimed Nobel Peace Prize author, Albert Camus, once said, “Those who prefer their principles over their happiness, refuse to be happy outside the conditions they seem to have attached to their happiness.”
Indeed, our principles tend to harden into habits and although habits give shape to our inner lives, they can mutate into the rigidity of routine and create a kind of momentum that, rather than expanding our capacity for happiness, contracts it. In the trance of routine and principled productivity, we end up showing up for our daily lives while being absent from them.
And, like my friend RevDruanna Johnston has shown us on FB, few things break us out of our routines and awaken us to the living substance of happiness more powerfully than travel. What gives value to travel is fear. It breaks down a kind of inner structure we have created through our “daily grind” of work and remaining in familiar surroundings. One can no longer cheat — hide behind the hours spent at the office or at the plant (those hours we protest so loudly, which protect us so well from the pain of being alone). Far from our own people, our own language, stripped of all our props, deprived of our masks (one doesn’t know the fare on the streetcars, or anything else), we are completely on the surface of ourselves. But also, soul-sick, we restore to every being and every object its miraculous value.
For my part, my entire life has been undergirded by the ethos that happiness is our moral obligation. My love of life also carries with it a silent passion for what would perhaps escape me, a bitterness beneath a flame. Each day I leave this cloister I call home … like a woman lifted from herself, inscribed for a brief moment in the continuance of the world … and have come to realize that there is no love of life without despair of life. Absolute bliss necessitates an equal capacity for contact with absolute despair.
Where am I going with this? My emotions are not just the fuel that powers the psychological mechanism of a reasoning creature: they are parts, highly complex and messy parts, of this creature’s reasoning itself.
What counts is to be human and simple. No, what counts is to be true, and then everything fits in, humanity and simplicity. When am I truer than when I am the world? My cup brims over before I have time to desire. Eternity is there and I was hoping for it. What I wish for now is no longer happiness but simply awareness.
Have a great week, Everyone. I love you … Aloha! heart emoticon
Hālau 'Aha Hui Lānākila 