My core fundamental philosophy of life, which is also what I believe the purpose of life to be, is:
To be at peace and live in harmony with nature.
Nature in this context doesn’t just mean the environment and trees and fruit and stuff.
It means “the world as it is”, the present tense.
It could be written as “to be at peace and live in harmony with the events that are happening which I have no control over”.
But that looks very long as a tattoo.
Suffering and pain is usually the result of fighting against what is.
It’s rarely the event that causes pain, but how we interpret and accept the event.
Deaths, illness, war, famine, torture – yes. These all cause great pain and suffering.
But when the storm has passed, how we hold onto those events, the things that happen to us, is the cause of either suffering, or peace.
Have you ever met someone who once had “it”? Maybe they were a star athlete in their day?
Or they were beautiful and everyone lauded over their looks?
And when you talk to them, despite having those gifts at one point, they’re bitter and resentful?
It’s not the event causing their suffering – the march of time, or an accident – but their need to hold onto something that has passed.
Their inability to accept “what is” or nature is the cause of their unhappiness.
Notice how I also don’t mention happiness in my philosophy of life?
Happiness is like any other emotion.
It’s fleeting.
It comes and goes, like any other emotion.
I gladly embrace and cherish the moments of happiness and joy, but I also understand that it’ll pass.
Just like anger, sadness, jealousy and all the other emotions we can feel, happiness fades with time.
And our constant desire to chase happiness and find “joy” is again, a great source of suffering.
When I was at my step-fathers funeral, after his sudden death, I wasn’t thinking “I can’t wait until I’m happy about this.”
At most, I wanted to be at peace.
When we cling onto happiness and spend more time, energy and money avoiding pain, it becomes a constant state of unhappiness because we always rush to the next jolt of happiness.
There are things that bring joy, of course, but the idea that we can surround ourselves with things that bring us joy is childish and short sighted.
You probably live the most comfortable, safe, wealthy existence of any of your genealogies.
For 99% of human history we’ve struggled for food, warmth, shelter, disease, illness, war and water.
You live the absolute most comfortable life that anyone in your gene pool has ever lived.
People 50 years and 100 years and 500 years ago would be agog at how comfortable and safe your life is now.
Just as a baby has the capacity to feel joy and happiness and laugh with absolutely nothing in front of them.
You too have the capacity for joy and happiness here and now.
The illusion is that happiness is in the outcome you seek.
It isn’t.
Having that next thing or achieving that next thing will bring you no more happiness than the last thing.
Does that mean stop striving or moving towards goals?
Absolutely not.
But it does mean that if you aren’t capable of being happy with what you’ve got now, you sure aren’t going to be any happier with more.
