Friday, April 6, 2007

Happiness everwhere

A OFD colleague commented here in an ealier posting that raised awareness is often accompanied by a dramatic increase in the frequency of its obervation.

His last post on happeness has had a similarly infectious effect on me, one of which was while watching The Life of David Gage starring Kevin Spacey in which he delivers a stirring perspective that treads on the same turf as the last blog:

...about outer-directed fulfillment

"Fantasy has to be unrealistic because the second you get what you no longer seek you don't - you can't - want it anymore. In order to continue to exist, desire must have its objects perpetually absent, or out of reach. It's not the 'IT' you want, it's the fantasty of the 'IT'"


..about chasing wants and what happinesses truly lies

"Living by your wants will never make you happy. What it means to be fully human is to strive to live by ideas and ideals, not to measure your life by what you've attained in terms of desires but by those small moments of integrity, compassion, rationality, even self-sacrifice. The only way we can measure the signifiance of our own life is by valuing the lives of others"

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

While desire and fantasy are inextricably linked, desire can also be fueled by the memory of reality. Chasing the unattainable eventually loses its luster. But recreating the memory of a specific, real encounter can be equally exciting.

Anonymous said...

Your thoughts remind me of two quotes I'm familiar with:

Margaret Young said: "Often people attempt to live their lives backwards. They try to have more things, or more money, in order to do more of what they want so they will be happier. The way it actually works is the reverse. You must first be who you really are,
then do what you need to do, in order to have what you want.

Leo C. Rosten said: "I cannot believe that the purpose of life is to be "happy." I think the purpose of life is to be useful, to be responsible, to be honourable, to be compassionate. It is, above all, to matter, to count, to stand for something, to have made some difference that you lived at all."