The Meaning of Life, Pt I

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This blog started out life as random emails I would send family and friends.  One such recent email broached the subject of the meaning of life.  As it was intended to be the first part in a multi-part stream, I felt it best to post it here as well so that the entire series, such that it is, is available to readers of the blog...
So, lately I’ve been hearing an awful lot of, “at least he’s happy, that’s what matters,” “I just want my kids to be happy,” “do what makes you happy”.  

Well, no.  

I’m certainly not a member of the Everyone Should Be Un-Happy Department, but happiness is largely a byproduct of a larger attitude.  I came across this quote:  “The purpose of life is not to be happy.  It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.”  -Ralph Waldo Emerson

To be perfectly honest, that’s not the purpose of life either, but it comes a whole lot closer.  We’ll zero in on the actual reason in future posts (we’ve discussed it before, so you probably know where I’m headed).  

But, Mr. Emerson, Ralph, if I may, at least understands that constructs outside of our petty, thin emotions come into play about how we should approach life.  It’s the difference between earning something and being given a token of appreciation.

You fire up an engine you have been wrenching on all day and to hear it cough into life brings an upswell of positive emotion in a job well done.  Compare that to signing a credit card receipt at the mechanic’s shop for them to get your car running.  Yes, you earned the money to pay for the work and you checked it off your list of things to get done, but what did you actually participate in?  Nothing.  It was an errand, maybe an important one, but an errand nonetheless compared to producing a result with your own hands.  “Happy” could be described to come from both actions, but is it the core of the event?  No, it is not.

Now, extend that to the realm of society and team work.  You now become the teacher of the mechanic and have the satisfaction of watching your charge go from zero knowledge to learning a skill, mastering it, and being able to provide for his family.  You’re happy.  You were happy before.  How do those two levels of happy compare?  And, is that happiness a strong enough driver to make you get out of bed everyday at 5AM and slog to work?  

The World is a space so much larger than ourselves, so rich, so complicated, that focusing inwards on “happiness” is to cheat ourselves of understanding and experience and to deprive the world of our influence, no matter how limited the scope.

If you must concern yourself with internal emotion, and there are times that such things are needed, may I suggest satisfaction over happiness.  Satisfaction is to happiness what love is to lust.  One burns wildly for a short time, where as the other provides warmth and light for a lifetime.  

And, this is only scratching the surface, dealing with the human and not the Divine.  

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