There is a teenager in Hawai’i I work with. What do I do with him? I basically help him express himself a bit more. Why did he stop talking? What is responsible for his introverted nature? These are questions that seem significant but regardless of what that is, we have to work with what we have today.
I came up with a lot of conversation topics and practice drills to help us just talk things out. Yesterday we had our normal session and we talked a bit about what we want from the future. Do we want to have a good future? Sure, that sounds nice. How do we get a good future? By working on it, obviously. But why do we, knowing all of the above, find ourselves not working on the good future we supposedly want?
This leads us to realize something: there’s a part of us that DOESN’T want a good future, although paradoxically we DO want a good future. My buddy realized this yesterday, huh! There is a part of me that doesn’t want a good future. I asked him to dive a bit deeper and wonder, why would that be?
And in an uncharacteristically calm manner he told me he was too stressed.
When I work with students, my goal isn’t to get them to have better grades. My goal isn’t to get them to be more outgoing. Sure, those are things that we can achieve on the way but the primary approach I have is helping them have a happy life.
When I work with adults, my goal isn’t to get them to have more money. My goal isn’t to get them to be more successful. Sure, those are things that we can achieve on the way but the primary approach I have is helping them have a happy life. In that way, it doesn’t really matter who I work with; my agenda is happiness, first and foremost.
So this conversation breaks my heart. My buddy is having a stressful time. I want my buddy to be happy. I’m a bit greedy when it comes to happiness, I want not just happiness but I want everlasting happiness for everyone.
What good is a lot of money if I’m still suffering with a lot of money? What good is power if I’m still suffering with power? What good is anything worldly if I’m still suffering? For all the other things I think there are many excellent teachers who can help you get that. I’m not going to exclusively help you make a lot of money. I’m not going to exclusively help you be more powerful. Those aren’t important to me because they have no utility to me if I’m still prone to suffering with all those things.
Which motivates the next point. What good is happiness that isn’t everlasting? It feels great when I get a lump sum of money, for sure. But it eventually leads to a feeling of not enough money. It feels great when I eat something that tastes great, for sure. But it eventually leads to a feeling of yearning for that food when I can’t have it. In that way, transient happiness or happiness with a shelf life is as good as suffering; it’s just suffering in delayed release.
I want everlasting happiness. Then how does one get everlasting happiness? In everlasting happiness there would be no suffering. This means we can’t be pursuing pleasure or happiness that leads to suffering. It’s like that racoon washing their cotton candy to see it disappear:
In that case, we have to start the pursuit of everlasting happiness. But by virtue of starting that pursuit, that pursuit has to come to an end. We’ve come to a double bind! We can’t pursue specific things nor can we start pursuing anything. And yet the Buddha taught of unconditional, everlasting happiness.
This must mean that happiness must be somewhere we already know. Or better yet, this must mean that happiness must already be within us even without our search for it.
The logic checks out; there is somebody in the world who isn’t happy because they don’t have something that I have. I have a computer and I remember being so desperate to have one. I have a home and I remember being so desperate to have one.
Everlasting happiness was always around me, I just didn’t know it and appreciate it. I kept on being in pursuit of new dependent happiness and resented the world for not having things last. It’s like ordering Chinese food and resenting the restaurant because they didn’t give me pizza.
Then we could ask ourselves this: isn’t that still being dependent on something that we have? Let’s reason with that. You can take away my home, you can take away my computer, you can take away all of my possessions and I will still have something. In fact that is the most important thing I have: my life.
For tens of thousands of years people were happy without a cell phone, without Instagram, without a car, without dogs or anything else. But when somebody was happy, there was one thing they had: their life.
Yes, could there be a source of everlasting happiness that transcends your lifetime? Sure, but do you care about that? What good is everlasting happiness if you can’t experience it in your lifetime? This is why Asita the fortune teller cried when he read the Buddha’s fate: he would not be alive to learn the dharma from the Buddha.
True, everlasting happiness was always yours. It never left you. We have to be able to see this everlasting happiness and hold it in our hearts today. We have to be happy, everlastingly happy today; unconditionally so. I would hate for you to realize that your life was happy at the last moment after living a life of misery.
Let us be happy today, and on top of that we can layer on our ambitions for life. Let us be happy today. Let yourself be happy, right now.
Billy Seol
July Life Coach
julylifecoach.com
