Don't Let Happiness Run away

Anonymous

A college student once told me, "I don't need to be happy—just successful." It's an odd juxtaposition1. She needn't be happy—"just successful". She places one in opposition to the other.

For students, today's expressions are tomorrow's practices. Their words can be the visible signs of the less visible struggles encountered by all of us.

I have a memory from my own undergraduate years of a headline in my campus2newspaper: "Why Aren't We Happy? " As the headlinesuggests, we fell short of leading joyful lives. Yet at least happiness was still on the agenda. What underlies the tendency of many of us, like my success-seeking student, to give up genuinely trying?

I've often failed to enjoy Sunday because of my schedule on Monday. At bottom, it was simply anticipatory3anxiety over the work of the week ahead—fear that there would be unexpected complications or that I would fail to measure up in some way. Usually, when Monday came, I did quite well. Much of what I worried about never happened.

Joy has its own moral underpinning. There's a completeness to joy that does not allow us to exclude4our sense of the person we should be. Pleasure is certainly possible in less-than-honorable actions. But the experience of joy requires more: it is pleasure taken in worthy things.

True joy requires choices that develop into habits that evolve into character. And that's work we can't delegate5. The first essential step is trying to live a less fearful life—one that avoids collapsing life's possibilities before exploring them. It entails welcoming uncertainty and comfortable incompleteness.

热词天地

1.juxtaposition [ˌdʒʌkstəpə'zɪʃn] n．并置；并列；毗邻

2.campus ['kæmpəs] n．大学校园；校区

3.anticipatory[ænˌtɪsɪ'peɪtərɪ] adj．期待着的；提早发生的

4.exclude[ɪk'sklu:d] vt．排除，不包括；排斥；驱除，赶出

5.delegate['delɪɡət] vt．委派代表；授权给