There’s a great saying by the Dalai Lama: happiness is the journey, not the destination. It rightly emphasizes that happiness can never be postponed; you don’t wait for something to happen, in order to become happy.
In fact people who think only: “I’ll be happy if she changes her ways,” or “I’ll be happy once I’m rich,” are never going to be happy. Fact.
Relying on outside sources to be happy is a sure way to postpone happiness forever!
Real happiness, real contentment, is enjoying your journey towards some desired goal.
I love riding steam trains (it’s a thing I’ve had since I was a kid, OK?). But I couldn’t care less where we are going to! I love the sound of the engine, the smell of steam and hot oil, the rumble of the trucks and carriages… It’s the journey that inspires me! That’s my idea of steam happiness.
But of course, the train has to be going somewhere. So the destination comes into it. It’s the same in life.
Happiness is the journey: but where to? The train ride to a prison camp sure wouldn’t be. So the destination is also critical. We can restate Old Giggly’s epithet into: happiness is the journey towards a desired goal.
In that case, you need a worthwhile destination or, as we would put it, a goal or purpose. Now in my writings, I point out a very important difference between a goal and a purpose. Purpose is a far higher creation. A goal is what you need to fulfill your purpose. But I’m not going to do all that stuff just here: it’s in my “Success On Your Own terms” course.
Let’s keep it simple and say that a purpose is where you want to be, what you want to do; not so much of the what you want to have. The goal is the outward expression of your purpose.
We can have several purposes at one time, though usually one is the dominant purpose in life.
Kids form their purposes early on. Kids are not as immature as some adults like to think. I remember my early purposes. I wanted to be the king (that one hasn’t left me, by the way)! But very early on I formed the purpose of being a writer. I didn’t think to myself in terms of a writer; that’s an adult concept. But I wanted to write! I got great marks in school essays and stuff.
Hey: as an adult, it’s my number #1 purpose. It’s my life purpose. And that’s true for a lot of kids; their early purposes remain valid often, right into adult life.
Of course the pressure of “sensible” adult advice often steers a kid away from what they want to do. So they are dismally unhappy for the rest of their days (or unless they can break free and do what they really chose to do in life).
All Else Is Waiting
So we can conjure up a couple of terms for higher living: on-purpose and off-purpose. They seem pretty self-explanatory. To be on-purpose, or living and fulfilling your dream, is to be truly alive and happy. There is no other kinds of happiness that counts.
After the disaster which wiped out three of the “Flying Wallendas”, Karl Wallenda was asked if that meant he would give up his high wire act, which was famous for performing death-defying stunts without a safety net. His answer was a classic response for a man living his purpose: “I will never give up. Life is being on the wire; everything else is just waiting.”
Karl himself was killed just 38 days after the comeback. He was trying a walk between the two towers of a ten-story building, 120 feet above the ground. A high wind blew him off. But you can bet he died happy. He was 75 years old and most folks at that age are having trouble moving around. They are just waiting, for death…
As a happy footnote, just a few weeks ago on June 4, 2011, his descendant Nik completed the high-wire crossing that killed his great-grandfather, citing Karl Wallenda as his “biggest hero in life”
As the Victorian poet Robert Browning said:
“Ah but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?”
There is no heaven unless you are stretching yourself to do more, become more and create more.
All this relates to mastery, by the way. Mastery is also about getting there and the importance of the journey. Arriving at the destination is rather inconvenient, because it interrupts the flow (in fact those in search of mastery will always says that a lifetime is not long enough: you never actually arrive on your journey to mastery).