On Being Happy

I saw a quote: "The secret to being happy is realizing that everything is already perfect."  About the same time a friend on mine said something along the lines of "Stop seeking what you want, It will find you."  So for the past few months I have tried to follow these two nuggets of advice.  You may have noticed that I have not posted in this blog for a while as most of my posting was about how to make things better.  But, if everything is already perfect, I don't need to post anymore. And if I should stop seeking, well what then?

I feel that it has been a partial success. But I find myself constantly stopping myself.

I see someone doing something in a way that I think could be done better. I start to speak, but bite my tongue and don't say anything.  Maybe the way I thought was better is not better.  Maybe what they were doing was good enough.  If everything is perfect, then their actions are also perfect. Maybe they needed to do it that way to learn an important life lesson and if I interfered they would not learn it and get into bigger trouble later. Cool, no stress in trying to explain myself, no resentment from correcting someone, the task gets done and maybe they learned what they needed to learn.

I see something that I would really like to do but I am not in the position to pursue it.  My natural instinct is to do everything I can to seek a path to be able to do it.  So I stop myself, put it on my someday list and move on.  If I had put in all the extra effort to seek the path, what would have been the cost.  Maybe I would be exhausted all the time and get sick.  Concentrating on that unattainable path would take all my concentration such that I would miss other opportunities that would have been just as interesting and useful without the pain.  Some other natural paths that would lead to where I wanted to go may be missed.

However, there is a temptation to take these two quotes and start doing nothing, navel gazing if you will.  After a bit of doing nothing, I get very unsatisfied.  Is my purpose in this world to do nothing? (This the dark side of stop seeking.)  If everything is already perfect I need not do anything.  (This is the dark side of always seeing perfection.) Well, what now?  How do I resolve this.

For the quotes above there others in the opposite direction just as valuable.  I am sure you could come up with many, but some that I like are:  "God helps those who help themselves" and "Every journey of a 1000 miles begins with one step. 

If everything is perfect, then why do you need to help yourself?  If you have stopped seeking, where are you going on the journey.  Are we to just wander aimlessly in our life's journey and simply enjoy all the perfection we see?  Well kinda but not really. 

How wishy-washy can I be!  There is a point in here somewhere!

We miss the point when we do as humans are most tempted to do and simplify everything to black and white.  What we miss the the infinite shades of gray (and of course the colors.)  We miss that there is stuff in the middle.  We miss that the tension between the extremes generates an entire universe where everything is perfect, we don't need to sacrifice everything to seek a path, we get what we need (often more)  and we have a purposeful journey with many accomplishments along the way.   It is not that there is a fixed middle way.  The middle way is a dynamic tension created by all the extremes pulling on each other.  The middle way is flexible, ever shifting and always playful. It is like surfing, riding the ever changing wave without flipping out into the sky or falling under the water. The exhilaration of maintaining the present moment to stay in tune with the wave is what makes it playful and fun.

For myself, I am looking to be happy riding that wave again after some time off.  What wave are you riding.