158. Surprise! The happiness we seek through dating is already ours

Do you want to be happy in these mature dating years? If so, bring happiness to your dating; don’t expect dating to bring happiness to you. “But that doesn’t make sense,” you may be saying to yourself. “The reason I’m dating is to find happiness and now you’re telling me to be happy first and then bring that with me. Sounds crazy.”

You’re right, it does sound crazy. But if you really look at life, as the sages and masters have been advising us for eons, you see that this is the way life works. There’s nothing magical about what I’m saying, and nothing miraculous or even spiritual. It’s just what is. Let me explain.

I know that most of us in the senior dating field are trying to find happiness. Over the more than 10 years that I’ve dated since my wife died I’ve talked to a lot of mature and senior folks who date. Many of them find dating a chore. They’d much rather just be settled down with the right person and live happily ever after. So even though it seems to be work in many cases, they continue dating to find the happiness they feel they’re missing without a partner.

But we really already are the happiness we seek, even when we don’t know it. Here’s why. In my last article I talked about how happiness is always short-lived. No matter what we get, it’s soon not enough and we’re back on the rat-wheel again, searching for the next thing to make us happy. We’ve done it all our lives. We know what it feels like and we even know down deep that it’s a fruitless search. Yet we haven’t known what else to do.

When I say we are happiness already I mean that when you look, you might notice that happiness is your true nature. It’s only been covered over by the self-centered “me” thoughts that are usually resisting something in our experience, whether it’s personal, such as being stood up for a date, or something broader such as the war in Iraq. But when we let life be just as it is, we discover that what’s always been there as our basic nature is simply peace and happiness.

Dating can be an interesting exploration and an adventure that’s fun. But when we’re dating because we think we’ll find happiness, we’re on a hopeless, endless path. If happiness can start it can end. But that never-ending awareness that registers all experiences – that sense of beingness or knowing that you are - is nothing but peace and joy and unconditional love.

Don’t believe what I’m saying; look in your own life. We’ve all had those times when, even for brief moments, we’re not conscious of wanting anything at all. We’re just flowing in harmony with life as it is – just being. There’s a relaxation in that, a contentedness, an ease. There are no problems. That’s the happiness we already are. We don’t have to look anywhere for it because we can’t look for what we are right now. When we give up judgments, when we give up opinions, when we stop thinking we know how the world and our circumstances should be, guess what’s left. Happiness.

Copyright © 2006 Chuck Custer