166. Accepting “what is” in mature dating reveals the happiness we seek

The real source of our happiness – whether we think a partner or a new car will do it – is pretty hard to see. By the time you’re a senior or mature person in the dating world you’ve probably noticed that when we get happiness it doesn’t seem to last very long. Yet all we know how to do when the short-lived happiness is gone is to try for something new. So life becomes continued stress and striving, punctuated by brief respites of happiness and peace.

I was talking about happiness in the article (#165.) I wrote yesterday, and I said:
“What does actually make us happy if it isn’t getting more? Strangely enough the sages have been teaching forever that the end of seeking reveals the happiness that’s already our true nature. It’s just been waiting for us to notice. A Chinese spiritualist and philosopher of many centuries ago, Chuang-Tzu, put it this way: ‘Happiness is the absence of striving for happiness.’

Seeking and striving by its very nature tells us that we’re not happy with what is right now. So seeking, itself, is unhappiness.”

Maybe a little expansion or clarification of that would help. Until we look closely we don’t see that getting something we wanted really has nothing to do with the short-lived happiness we feel at that time. We think we got the thing we wanted and it made us happy. But soon our achievement or acquisition became commonplace and the happiness wore off.

But the truth is different. The reason a sage writes that happiness is the end of striving for happiness is that it’s in that space after we get something that we let go of the seeking and struggle for a short time. That’s when we’re happy and at peace. Check out your own experience and you’ll probably see that it works like this:
1. We want something.
2. We strive to get it.
3. Sometimes we actually do get it.
4. Then we’re happy and we think it’s because we got what we wanted.
5. We don’t see that it’s the end of seeking, the relaxing, not the getting, that made us happy.

There’s peace when we simply relax into our natural being, without the effort and struggle of trying. Then, for a short time we’re all right with the world. We’re not unhappily looking for something more, bigger or better. That relaxed acceptance of the world just the way it is leaves us with the uncaused joy that’s our natural state. If joy is like a light bulb, wanting and striving is covering it with mud. When we clean off the mud of wanting and desire, and let life flow the way nature intended, the light shines brightly and happily, as it always has been.

So how can we be happy when we’re dating? We’re happy when we simply relax with what’s happening. We’re actually being lived by the ultimate source that is everything. If it’s meant for us to date, we do. If it’s meant for us to find a partner we do. Life, like the ocean, ebbs and flows. We’re happy and peaceful when we just allow it to be as it is. And isn’t happiness and peace the reason for dating in the first place?

Copyright © 2007 Chuck Custer