Anxiety
Anxiety is a thing. It has its own word. It represents a well-studied (and often experienced) nervous disorder.
Happiness for no reason is a thing.
It doesn’t have it’s own word.
It isn’t well studied.
And people seem to experience it little.
It’s less of a thing.
Mandatory
Anxiety deserves as much respect as happiness-for-no-reason.
Yet anxiety doesn’t deserve to be more of a thing.
Balance
Why isn’t happiness-for-no-reason more of a thing?
Or
Why do we experience unease-for-no-reason – more than – happiness-for-no-reason?
It’s likely a combination of Nature and Nurture – biology and habit.
We can’t do much about the biology side of things, yet we can work with habit
Double Rainbows
We spend most our life trying to do things that make us happy. We make a habit of happiness-always-for-a-reason. When reasons do not look valid or simply do not appear, we feel uneasy. Our happiness is threatened and so is our structure of meaning.
It makes good sense to be anxious when all happiness and all meaning is threatened. It’s logical to be anxious if every bit little of your happiness and every little bit of your meaning could be utterly wiped-out by some vague uncontrollable event in the not-too-distant future.
The experience of anxiety is not the problem; a cultural habit of total reliance on pre-determined, specific, unchanging reality is.
Happiness-for-no-(or not so easily defined in this post)-reason
Occasionally in meditation, whilst doing all the other good work, you fall into an experience in which you forget everything. You forget the world around you, your opinions, the targets of your expectations, your relationships, your work, your things, your stuff, your thoughts and your problems. You forget everything. Every single thing in your life is utterly wiped-out and forgotten in an instant … and happiness is still available.
Is that experience good for you?
Yes.
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