Pair #51 All is Never Enough
I can understand that we want stuff. I want stuff. I want to have things, I want to feel things, I want experiences as well as stuff.
Stuff is great and it’s fun. You can eat it, play with it, climb it, build with it and talk it for a drive. It’s just a really crap way to find happiness when we feel empty.
Our human paradox or curse or whatever you want to call it is that, having no experience of a sense of happiness arising from the inside, we look outside and unfortunately 'finding' happiness outside of ourselves isn't possible.
That's just a fact. It's simply impossible. I don't know about you, but I looked!
Most of us will look outside, sometimes for a long time, before we become ready to turn inward. Sometimes it is only the disappointment that arises out of great, great avarice that may finally teach someone that no amount of things (money, love, sex or Anything) will ever be the key to happiness. In that sense avarice and greed may be bizarrely good things that accelerate a normally slow process of discovering the emptiness of things. When we don't understand that happiness already lies within us, I believe this is what we do.
Excess is the same. Some of us need to go to excess in something, or many things, in order to find the boundaries of it. But if we go to excess in the acquisition of things, it simply has the same ending point: to teach us there is no satisfaction here.
We all learn that lesson in our own ways. Who can say who has the best way?
But you don’t win the game if you are the one with the most toys when you die.
Stuff is great and it’s fun. You can eat it, play with it, climb it, build with it and talk it for a drive. It’s just a really crap way to find happiness when we feel empty.
Our human paradox or curse or whatever you want to call it is that, having no experience of a sense of happiness arising from the inside, we look outside and unfortunately 'finding' happiness outside of ourselves isn't possible.
That's just a fact. It's simply impossible. I don't know about you, but I looked!
Most of us will look outside, sometimes for a long time, before we become ready to turn inward. Sometimes it is only the disappointment that arises out of great, great avarice that may finally teach someone that no amount of things (money, love, sex or Anything) will ever be the key to happiness. In that sense avarice and greed may be bizarrely good things that accelerate a normally slow process of discovering the emptiness of things. When we don't understand that happiness already lies within us, I believe this is what we do.
Excess is the same. Some of us need to go to excess in something, or many things, in order to find the boundaries of it. But if we go to excess in the acquisition of things, it simply has the same ending point: to teach us there is no satisfaction here.
We all learn that lesson in our own ways. Who can say who has the best way?
But you don’t win the game if you are the one with the most toys when you die.
© 2010 Elese Coit
If you wish to reprint, feel free, please link back here and if it's of use, include:
"Elese Coit is a leader in transformative personal change and Hosts the Radio Show A New Way To Handle Absolutely Everything. To see the world differently, reach for one of her '101 New Pairs of Glasses' each day on http://elesecoit.com"
Thank you.
If you wish to reprint, feel free, please link back here and if it's of use, include:
"Elese Coit is a leader in transformative personal change and Hosts the Radio Show A New Way To Handle Absolutely Everything. To see the world differently, reach for one of her '101 New Pairs of Glasses' each day on http://elesecoit.com"
Thank you.
