31. You're happy naturally when you drop your "shoulds"

Happiness. It’s the one thing we’re all looking for isn’t it? Whether it’s the teenage kid wanting to get his first car or the widower in his 60s who’s thrilled about the new woman he’s just met, we’re looking for happiness. Any time we want something it stems from the desire to be happy. We think if we get what we want it will add to our happiness. And it does, for a short time. But then we all know by this age, we’ll soon be on the search-for-happiness treadmill again. It never fails, what we get isn’t satisfying for very long.

I’ve talked about happiness in these articles, but what I mean is not a happiness that’s the opposite of unhappiness. That kind of happiness is always temporary and fickle. It’s here one minute and gone the next. Unhappiness is always lurking in the shadows. It comes in the form of worry that the thing we got will be gone, or we’ll get bored with it or it won’t deliver what we had pictured.

The kind of happiness I’m talking about is what you might also call inner joy, or contentment, or ease of life. I mean a general relaxation about life, where you notice that life has no problems; it’s all just an interesting adventure. The funny thing is, we don’t have to search for anything or get anything to have that kind of easy joy. We don’t have to search because that’s who we already are when we stop covering our essence with our inflated, ego-infected ideas of how the world should be.

When we let go of opinions and judgments and just see life as it unfolds, we’re like the child who just sees a fascinating world to explore. You don’t have to give a small child happiness. They’re happy naturally as long as they don’t have a physical problem, such as being hungry or needing to be changed. That same inner satisfaction and wonder for life is our nature also. It’s simply a matter of surrendering to life, just as it is.

Copyright © 2005 Chuck Custer