Читать книгу Happiness - Kerstin Hack - Страница 5

What is happiness?

Happiness by chance?

Being lucky is not the same as being happy.

Many people believe that happiness is something that happens to them by chance: winning the lottery, meeting your dream girl, inheriting a countryside villa. Great luck does indeed bring happiness. But not for long. Those happy feelings normally don’t last for more than three months. After that the lucky fellows are just as (un)happy as before.

Learned happiness

Every man is the architect of his own fortune.

No one can control all their circumstances. Yet people who actively and consciously shape their lives are generally happier than those who passively wait for "good fortune". We can learn to be happy. To be more precise: Happiness itself can’t be learned but the ways of thinking and acting that lead to happiness can be.

Happy are the people whose God is the Lord. —Ps 144:15

God wants us to be happy. He created us in such a way that all actions which bring forth, foster and sustain life are accompanied by feelings of happiness. This is true for actions that sustain the biological life like sex, eating, movement and learning but also for activities which foster social life like loving, giving, doing something meaningful. In short:

Everything that brings life also makes us happy.

This happiness-giving God likes to give us advice on good lifestyle choices. The bible and other classics are full of tested wisdom about ways to succeed in life and to be happy. These old pieces of advice and the results of modern "happiness research" are surprisingly similar. Pondering them and entering into a conversation with the creator of life himself could be a first step towards happiness.