Keys to Happiness

By Richard Graves

This book has been written to provide another perspective to the common pursuit of happiness being advocated today. We often hear of people making dramatic changes to their lives in order to find happiness. This book provides methods that are more incremental in nature and a little more closer to home.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Richard Graves
• Release date: Feb 27, 2015
• ISBN: 9781310207853

Book preview

Keys to Happiness

Richard Graves

Copyright 2015 by Richard Graves

All Rights Reserved

Smashwords Edition

Contents

Desiderata, Attributed to Max Ehrmann

Preface

Chapter One: What is Happiness?

Chapter Two: Physical Keys to Happiness

Chapter Three: Environmental Keys to Happiness

Chapter Four: Emotional Keys to Happiness

Chapter Five: Mental Keys to Happiness

Chapter Six: Spiritual Keys to Happiness

Conclusion

Afterword

If, by Rudyard Kipling

Desiderata

Go placidly amid the noise and haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence.

As far as possible, without surrender, be on good terms with all persons.

Speak your truth quietly and clearly; and listen to others, even the dull and ignorant; they too have their story.

Avoid loud and aggressive persons, they are vexations to the spirit.

If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain and bitter;

for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.

Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans.

Keep interested in your career, however humble; it is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time.

Exercise caution in your business affairs; for the world is full of trickery.

But let this not blind you to what virtue there is; many persons strive for high ideals;

and everywhere life is full of heroism.

Be yourself. Especially, do not feign affection.

Neither be critical about love; for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment it is as

perennial as the grass.

Take kindly the counsel of the years, gracefully surrendering the things of youth.

Nurture strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune. But do not distress yourself with imaginings.

Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness. Beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself.

You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and stars; you have a right to be here.

And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.

Therefore be at peace with God, whatever you conceive Him to be,

and whatever your labors and aspirations, in the noisy confusion of life keep peace with your soul.

With all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world.

Be careful. Strive to be happy.

Attributed to Max Ehrmann 1927

Preface

The purpose of this book is to help people achieve a higher state of happiness. This book has been written to create an internal, as well as external, dialogue about life and the nature of our existence. This book does not have the answers to life's great questions. You have the answers to life's great questions even if the answer for a given moment is I do not know. This book is designed to condense the organic wisdom we all intuitively know while asking deep existential questions. Questions that, whether or not we acknowledged them, have always been with us.

The goal for this book has been to provide a quick helpful read that would be accessible to everyone regardless of time or energy. It has been written in an informal conversational manner. The impression given is as though you are having a conversation with an old friend. A friend who you have not seen in a long time. It has been self published and written with brevity in order to give you content without exhaustive reading. How you reflect on each chapter, your own interpretations of the keys, and the conversations you will have with others will be far more enlightening then reading the chapters themselves.

This book has also been written to provide another perspective to the common pursuit of happiness advocated today. It is very common to hear people making dramatic changes to their lives in order to pursue true happiness. Often times these changes are committed when people are older and involve severing interdependent relationships with others. This book has been written to illuminate another way to pursue happiness while not entirely discouraging the essence of the former. A path towards happiness that is more incremental in nature and a little more closer to home.

I hope you enjoy this quick read and hope it guides you in the direction of your own personal happiness. You may not wholly agree with all the concepts in this book but I promise you will find something within that will speak to you. All of our lives are different journeys over the same road. May this book help you on your journey.

What is Happiness

The question of what is happiness is an old question and often a sign of a prosperous life or society. People do not have the luxury of wondering whether they are happy in a harsh environment. Survival for the given moment is enough. This fact alone leads some to conclude that happiness is an illusion. Others believe people are most happy when they do not have the time to contemplate the question. There have been quite a few studies on how people can develop a fond nostalgia for times of extreme deprivation such as war. People often describe feeling more connected to others during those hard times then at any other point in their lives. Defining happiness, however, is too important to abdicate to external events.

The question of What is happiness has always been an important one for me. The family I was born into struggled with depression and substance abuse. I can still clearly recall my father telling me happiness was like a virus in that you had to be infected with it in order to give it to someone else. He was in the latter stages of his battle with Lou Gehrig's disease and was in the process of making sense of his life instead of merely living it. I saw a man struggling to come to terms with a lifelong lack of happiness. I empathized with him and thought normal people never had to struggle with such reflections. Years later, and well after I started to develop my own ALS like symptoms, I realized we all struggle with the question of what it means to be happy. I went from judging people to seeing them trying, each in their own ways, to find the answer to one of life's most important questions. A question they never knew they were struggling to answer.

Philosophers have often made attempts to define happiness in the last four thousand years. The main concepts can be summarized into two categories; Eternalism vs Existentialism. This is a crass oversimplification of philosophy but a necessary one in order to make the question manageable for this quick read. More detailed positions can easily be researched once the main distinctions have been made.

Socrates was one of the great philosophers of Classical Greece and is often thought of as the father of western philosophy. Classical Greece was in a decadent stage of it's empire while Socrates lived. The concept of restraint or monogamy was laughable to the people of the time. Slavery was a well established right without any moral considerations. Indulgence was the order of the day, as it eventually becomes for all great empires, and one of the defining symbols of success.

Socrates was one of the first people in history to speculated on an absolute and universal morality. Life was not simply a question of enjoying one's self to the fullest or accumulating the most wealth. Socrates thought that life's greatest challenge was to live life well. It was our responsibility to examine our own lives as well as our actions within it. Inappropriate conduct, in Socrates mind, stemmed from a lack of knowledge. We needed to constantly examine our world in order to educate ourselves. People were greedy, lustful, or violent out of ignorance and would not fall into such patterns if they properly understood the world. He articulated the concept where the things we know in life were only illusions. Happiness rested in knowing the true reality of things. Socrates believed in how things should be and not how they were.

Socrates never recorded his own thoughts and we only know of his philosophical ideas by way of his pupils. Plato was a student of Socrates and went on to develop an allegory often called Plato's Cave (some say this was Socrates as well). The abridged concept of Plato's Cave is that we are all prisoners in a mental cave. In this cave we only see the shadows of things instead of the actual things themselves. We see only the distorted images of our physical existence instead of reality. Our goal should be to educate ourselves, stop focusing on how things look, and see things as they truly are. Socrates, Plato, and the students who followed were some of the first eternalists of Western Philosophy. There is far more to life then life itself for an eternalist.

Existential philosophy espouses living in the moment and getting rid of all notions of universality. There are no universal or abstract truths to an existentialist. Everything is subjective. The only life we have is the one we are living right now. Enjoy your existence because it is the only real thing.

People often see this mentality as atheistic but this doesn't necessarily have to be the case. Kierkegaard was a Christian existential philosopher who wanted people to embrace their religion instead of simply following the herd to church every Sunday. He wanted people to passionately connect to their faith on a deeply personal level. Kierkegaard, as an example, would have no interest in debates about evolution vs creationism. To him, faith should not be represented or discussed in a public setting. Faith was intensely personal and could not be justified to anyone. Kierkegaard once countered a friend's contention that the Bible could not withstand factual analysis by reminding his friend that Christianity was a religion requiring faith. This would not be necessary if the Bible merely told people two plus two equaled four. The fact that the Bible held some unbelievable stories were what required him to have faith. A personal faith in those stories were an integral part of what made him a Christian.

Nietzsche is considered one of the greatest existential philosophers and is often used as the standard for the whole genre. Nietzsche was also known as an attack philosopher and often made belittling comments about other philosophers. One of Nietzsche's favorite targets was Socrates whom he held responsible for inhibiting mankind from enjoying it's own existence.

Nietzsche liked to say that Socrates spoke of analyzing life and absolute morality because Socrates was an ugly man in a society that only venerated beauty. Socrates simply pretended to choose a life different to the indulgent life the rest of the Greeks were living. He may have made convincing arguments but, in reality, he had no choice in the matter. Socrates was nothing more than an ugly man pretending to loathe decadent parties. Parties for which he would never receive invitations.

What infuriated Nietzsche was how Socrates's emotional baggage had saddled down generations of people afterwards. The religion of Christianity, Nietzsche felt, had it's roots in Socrates's concept of eternalism and absolute truth. The whole concept of living a moral life, a life that was absolutely and objectively the right way to live, was inconceivable to Nietzsche. As inconceivable as placing boundaries on oneself in this life in order to go to Heaven in the next. Nietzsche wanted people to live life instead of analyze it. Heaven was to be found here on Earth. He preferred the Greeks who owned slaves and partied to the thoughtful philosophers.

Nietzsche felt we should authentically be ourselves without thinking. Self evaluation would actually obscure instead of clarify. He felt Christians had to cite many reasons why they lived their lives within boundaries (because it was the right thing to do, so they could go to Heaven, because the Bible said they should, etc.) but an ancient Greek living in excess never had to justify their way of life to anyone. An ancient Greek would only have one thing to say about the life they lived; it was who they were.

Many of us have heard this argument throughout our lives. Why may not have noticed but it was always there. There is always a member of a group who parties more then the rest. They could cheat on their partner or use mysterious drugs because the night was all about feeling alive. Sometimes they would even pull someone else away from the group to be an accomplice. Happiness was based on a thrill and it didn't matter if it was a good thrill or a dangerous one.