"It's an experience of absolute well-being that radiates through all physical, emotional, and mental states--even that that might be ordinarily labeled as unpleasant."
I've been trying to convince my son, Ben, that there is such a thing as happiness. He has read Camus and believes that the rock is always going to be falling back on him.
So I started re-reading Joy of Living and came upon the above quote as something to work with in advancing my argument. It's a tricky and interesting quote because it's easy to misread it and think that happiness is the absolute well-being. In fact happiness is the experience of this state of peace. It's not being in a continuous state of blissful calm that constitutes happiness, it's the intuitive knowledge that this state is there.
Many people who meditate, myself included much of the time, have an intellectual, conceptual grasp of this ideas. Formal meditation, regular practice, is what makes it truly understood at the physical and emotional level.
But note, this definition also encompasses the unpleasant sensations. Happiness can actual radiate from and radiate through stress. This morning I read this really interesting article in the NYTimes on How To Be Better At Stress. The theory is that perceiving the stress response as something that makes you stronger, as part of a thriving body, makes people both physically and psychologically stronger.
My goal in the next month, and in the next year (birthday on Tuesday) is to work on having an intuitive of how deep abiding calm and stress can work together to make me stronger and healthier. The trick is to be able to experience both at the same time. To be able to thrive from the benefits of both.
