Happy____________. (fill in the blank)

5/13/2015

Happy____________. (fill in the blank)

Dear old and new friends,

“Happy” is our favorite wish extended for birthdays, New Year’s and other holidays. To wish happiness to another is not an insignificant wish since studies show that happy people live longer and are healthier than those who are not. Happy people bounce back quickly from setbacks and failures. Happy people are the most attractive. While exercise is touted as the best medicine, from medical research its Siamese twin is being happy. If you filled in the empty blank in the title of this reflection with your own name, would you expect any surprise in your life?

Unfortunately those greeting cards wishing you happiness do not contain a package of it or a map with directions where to find it. In fairy tales, after many struggles, the young man and woman are married, with their story ending, “And they lived happily ever after.” That is the unspoken wish at every marriage, even if never expressed. In real life today unlike in the fairy tales, close to 50% of those married are not happy ever after, and often the marriage ends in divorce. Unknown is the actual figure of how many of those who remained married their whole lives do live happily ever after.

While I did not see the presentation I understand that last year PBS premiered a documentary entitled “Happy.” It featured interviews with people across the world and with scientists engaged in this happiness research who asked people what they wanted to be happy. If those research-scientists came to your door, how would you respond to their question, “What do you want to be happy?”

However their global research of that documentary revealed what wise men and women down through for the ages have proposed, if you’re interested in living happily ever after just follow this ancient secret map.

This map should be included with every birthday card since the ancient secret of happiness is in doing things for others!

Dan

5/14/2015 02:00:07 pm

Dear Ed,

I would say that the next word after Happy has to be “New” then still “fill in the blank”. Your blog this week ties into the one from last week. Part of being happy is to have “an intoxicating brew of the new.” I would also add that we will not be truly happy until it (whatever “it” is) is shared. Even better yet it to share of our self (doing for others). Now you get closer and closer to the core of happiness.

Happy New Friendships and Giving,
Dan

Kevin

5/18/2015 10:41:18 am

Next month, my mom and dad will celebrate their 65 years of being married. Happiness sometimes looks like a husband dutifully making his wife a drink at 5:00 every day just because she likes it - even if he thinks its "bad" for her. On another note, I wonder why the founding fathers thought that the pursuit of happiness was so important as to put it in the constitution. Happiness seems like such a fleeting emotion - happy now, frustrated moments later. Joy, on the other hand...

Dick Sumpter

5/20/2015 02:38:53 am

Kevin,
Jefferson put the pursuit of happiness in the Declaration of Independence, not the Constitution. He was a student of Aristotle and read him in the original Greek. Aristotle said, "that for the sake of which we do everything else is happiness." The word Aristotle used for happiness was "eudaimonia", which means fulfilling all your human capacities, or flourishing. The old Army recruitment slogan, "Be All you can Be" comes close. So when Jefferson said that pursuing happiness is an inalienable right he was espousing Aristotle's philosophy. He was also paraphrasing or adapting John Locke who first said that the inalienable rights were Life, liberty and property. Jefferson changed property to "happiness" because at the time many of the signers of the declaration were slaveholders and slaves were considered property. It would hardly have done for a declaration of "independence" to have cited ownership of slaves as a right - inalienable or otherwise.

5/25/2015 11:00:54 am

Thank you, Dick, not only for the correction but for the explanation. That was MOST helpful and insightful. I'll never hear/read the Declaration the same way!

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Happy____________. (fill in the blank)

Happy____________. (fill in the blank)

Edward Hays

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