The past two months have been hectic to say the least. I've been doing more courses in the university than during the fall, and I also started a new work project which actually turned out to take quite a lot of my time and energy. I'm doing things that are entirely new to me such as detailed project planning and resourcing. Factor in a new relationship and the end result has been an almost complete neglect to my own personal growth, which resulted in a slight depression.

Pohang, South Korea

During these couple of months I've learned something new, though. This is probably the first time ever when I have had so many promising opportunities that I simply can't get involved in all of them. I had to start prioritizing and actually refuse from things which is definitely something that doesn't come naturally to me.

Because of the standstill in my personal growth I have felt that I'm not moving forward, that I'm not evolving, and as a result I felt like I had betrayed myself and wasn't living up to my own standards. I also learned that this blog and my personal growth are very much intertwined. Without new profound realizations and discoveries in my own life it feels like I don't have enough interesting things to write about.

It's great to be able to plow through obstructions and get the job done. And it's good to keep yourself disciplined and on purpose. But if you forget your larger purpose while pursuing the small and endless tasks of daily life, then you have reduced yourself to a machine of picayune... Tasks are important, but no amount of duties adds up to love, freedom, or full consciousness. You cannot do enough, nor can you do the right things, so that you will finally feel complete.

- David Deida: The Way of the Superior Man

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Note: I wanted to try something different and refreshing with this weeks article, and I can only hope that my message about the importance of learning what happiness actually is comes across despite the writing style.

The metallic doorknob was warm to the touch. The door itself was of sturdy, wooden make, and behind the door would be 28 second year high school students whose lives he wanted to change. This was the moment of truth, so to speak. This was what the hard work of the past two years had been leading to. This would be, for the first time ever, Happiness 101 - an elective course in the science and philosophy of happiness, aimed at students who still were to decide what they wanted to do with their lives.

He wished that he would have had a chance to attend this course back when he was a student. It would have saved him a few years of drudgery, moving from job to job, from illusion to illusion, trying to pursue fleeting images of what would make him happy. He imagined being happy traveling the world. He wasn't. He imagined having a nice house and a nice car to make him happy. They didn't. He tried other pursuits too; practicing martial arts and immersing himself in painting, and sometimes he did feed happiness, but the happiness was always on the run, always seeming to slip his grasp and move farther away when he was about to reach it.

Then, two years ago, a friend of his shared a link on facebook that changed his life. It was a video recording of Matthieu Ricard's speech about the Habits of happiness. In that speech there is a section that imprinted itself on his memory, a section which he can recall word-by-word even to this day: 

So how do we proceed in our quest for happiness? Very often we look outside. We think that if we could gather this and that, all the conditions, something that we say "everything to be happy." To have everything to be happy, that very sentence already bears the doom of destruction of happiness; to have everything. If we miss something it collapses. And also when things go wrong we try to fix things outside so much, but our control on the outer world is limited, temporary, and often illusory.

So now look at inner conditions. Aren't they stronger? Isn't it the mind that translates the outer condition into happiness and suffering? And isn't that stronger? We know by experience, that we can be in what we call "a little paradise" and yet be completely unhappy within.

...The experience that translates everything is within the mind.

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It's been about 6 months since I decided to stop watching news on TV, reading newspapers (except when stealing a glimpse of a headline at the grocery), and following most news sites on the Internet. Back in my high school days I took special pride in reading the morning paper and keeping track on world affairs. But for what purpose? Other than it making me feel smug and superior to those who weren't doing it, I'm not sure I have a good answer.

Photo by just.Luc (just.Censored)

Unless you've been living in a shed, you know as well as any man on the street that the past decade has affected tremendously the availability and amount of information. Even before the Internet, TV and newspapers took care that when something noteworthy happened in the world, it didn't take long for you to get a report. Then came the Internet and the quantity of available information just exploded.

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I have been very hesitant about publishing this blog post. I started writing it couple weeks ago, only to stop after getting my main points down because I felt that this will put me in the same "faceless" group of hundreds or thousands of personal development bloggers out there. Not that there's anything wrong with writing about personal development, but I felt that I needed to approach these things from my own quirky semi-scientific point of view that I've been building.

What finally made me finish this article was, that the things I discuss here have had a positive impact on my own life. And by sharing this there is always a chance to influence others and help them achieve positive results as well.

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I don't know about you, but I believe that people live their lives in pursuit of happiness. Whether or not they consciously realize this doesn't matter. I believe that whatever choice or action a person does, the underlying reason for that particular action relate to the assumption, that by acting the person will feel a little bit happier afterwards. In a bad situation this could also mean, that people will act based on what they believe will cause the least amount of unhappiness or discomfort.

I think that this pursuit of happiness is very much evident in our buying decisions. Why would you buy e.g. a particular car, a pair of jeans, a hi-fi system or a pet unless you expect your quality of life to take a turn to the positive with that purchase?

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