striving and happiness

We spend a lot of time striving. Some of us spend our whole lives striving and never stop. What are we striving for really? We are striving to be happy. The problem is we go about it, for the most part, in a way that doesn't work. None of us is immune to this behavior. The only way you learn what does work is to exhaust yourself about what doesn't.

Happiness is not something you can arrive at later. That's not how happiness works. As long as you persist in the opinion that happiness is something you may not have now, but intend to have later, you will never be happy, not now, and not later. You may end up more comfortable, wealthier, famous, or friendlier, but you will not be happy, not in the sense of being completely at peace with yourself and your life.

Why is that? Why doesn't success in the area of striving pan out how it ought to with an end result of happiness? Mostly because of you. Once you get where you thought the happiness would be, once the striving pans out, you are still the same person who believed very deeply that you weren't happy enough yet, and that habit dies hard. It dreams up the next need before the last one is out of the box, or not long after.

Addressing that habit is the royal road to happiness. Only don't let that intention become another form of striving. There is nothing to strive for. You don't need to sort out every detail of how you have been striving previously and why it didn't serve you and what you ought to do next as a result. The fact is it did serve you, but not how you expected. It served you by teaching you it doesn't amount to happiness. If you don't know that for certain, you will do some more striving, and then you'll find out. Until you find out.

Once you do, you can let go of effort and finally be happy. You can laugh from deep inside that you made so much effort and did so much striving only to discover that effort and striving contradict what you were after. You'll laugh about this discovery because it's genuinely funny. If you find it genuinely funny now, you are well on the way to releasing yourself from striving and its perpetual disappointments. Let them go. Take a breath.

Good. Take another one. Breathe in; breathe out. That's all there is to it. Give it a try. Do it right now. Release yourself momentarily from your goals, concerns, ambitions. Put your striving aside and relax into the present experience of being where you are, as you are. There is nothing to change. You are already there. You are dwelling in perfect peace. Happiness is letting yourself.