Faith Venture

“They should be happy, happy,” he said.

I’ll never forget the passion of a local man when I was involved with school board politics a long time ago. The kids should be happy. We all should be happy.

It turned out that he was a very unhappy man. “The lady doth protest too much, methinks,” wrote Shakespeare. Sometimes we reveal much about ourselves in the negative of our passions.

The US Declaration of Independence includes the phrase “the pursuit of happiness.” Perhaps a bit of hyperbole.

Strange thing that is–happiness. As Thoreau said, “Happiness is like a butterfly: the more you chase it, the more it will evade you, but if you notice the other things around you, it will gently come and sit on your shoulder.”

Get out into nature daily. Help someone every day. Be generous to someone or something every day. Stop the pursuit and just live. And happiness will settle into your soul.

This entry was posted on October 14, 2019 at 6:20 am and is filed under Disciplines. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.