In the conquest of Mount Happiness

Told we are, that there is a concrete path for happiness. Like an end from a shopping list, we tick achievements and pursues, with little concern on the 'how' and any qualitative aspect of everything, expecting to reach Mount Happiness.

Our nature is of adaptive expectations. Our old run in our next to home mountains seems like a treasure during lockdown, while we were only pleased in 2019 with exotic places and remote landscapes, minimizing the magic of our local treasures. My forecast is that after the pandemic settle, whether it is in 2021, 2022 or later, many will come back to get used and undervalue the very many joys that our day-to-day offer.

A drink with friends, an intimate dinner with our partner in our favorite restaurant, or just a nice face to face discussion with our colleagues were not celebrated enough. In those times when the unlucky, the poor and the irresponsible suffers the consequences of COVID-19, there is a chance to see the magic in our day to day. You can either see life full or empty of miracles, if you put some consciousness and stop taken as given the food you eat, the air you breathe or the company you have.

Happiness is not an equation, an inventory or a given path. It is a state of gratitude, an attitude of peace that start inside and travels outside to share the gifts and to measure our worth in what we give, not on what we are or get.

Reading about minimalism certainly help me and it may help you. Fumio Sasaki explains in his book how and why a minimalist life helps to find peace, focus and health. Rather than setting it a goal of itself, minimalism is a method to bring space to your real being, to your own home, and makes the things that matter to you very clear. 

Flow is to happiness what consuming is to disorder and chaos. Our purse for positional goods, for fashion and comparison, our devoted competence and obsession to win instead of collaborate is a very unproductive path. 

Our global chase to be the number one, to own the scarce, the become externally defined as a special makes us very boring. Once the expensive becomes mainstream we jump to the next thing, in an infinite loop that will end with a collapse in the material and the spiritual, while probably the latter will hit us first...

Giving up stuff, sharing more, being brave an honest to ask for favors and give them makes us truly social. There is no money, or proper markets for connection, for genuine creativity and for love. The commodities of the human realm are mere tools for distraction. We need the others to achieve such a state of peace, order and love called happiness, and it is alright. It is indeed beautiful that no invention can or will overcome the sensation of helping another, or simply connecting, whether human or other living being.

In times when there is a false poverty of time, a persecution of leisure a glorification of hard work, an obsession with productivity, efficiency and speed, there are methods such as minimalism to get our treasures back: time to live fully, aside of distractions and information overdose, abundance of attention, with free agendas and long dinners discovering the forgotten meaning of life.

You can keep chasing Mount Happiness, only to realize that nor the peak nor the path was worth all this sacrifices, and your loved ones and your dearly only planet have deserved much more care and love than the one you have given.

Choose wisely, which Mount are you climbing, you only live once