Happiness, Here and Now

Finding Delight Close to Home

The world longs for us to be happy, to live with deep faith and easy breath, awake to the amazements that surround us and in fulfillment of our truest being. The world invites us to live in delight, to revel in the smallest beauties and widest wonders that etch themselves so casually into our days and that are coaxed into fullest bloom only through our adoration.

And yet how we confuse such faithful happiness by asking the wrong questions and by looking in the wrong direction for the fulfillments that already wait patiently all about us. How we confuse the world by insisting that it conform to our demands and to yield to our desires, in our misguided attempts to be unfettered and free.

Perhaps we might grow clear-eyed enough to see that contentment depends less on the outer world and more on the way we choose to receive it, by just how willingly we stretch open our arms. Perhaps we might even commit to opening our bodies and minds to the possibility that delight need not be cultivated or earned, but that it already exists all around us and only asks to be seen.

Right here and right now, the world invites us to look around, to scan the near distance for a hidden joy or two, for a taste of unbidden happiness that awaits our attention and that nudges us toward peace. It takes so little, when we incline our eyes just so, and our lists of small delights can almost feel like poems: a shock of yellow in the garden, chirping chant of a child, chocolate, walls that hold our lives together, deep sighs of relief, sounds of loved ones coming home.

As we begin to notice the small delights around us, we might even consider the possibility that we already have everything we need in order to be happy. We might sense that we don’t have to travel far in order to feel content. We might even begin to wonder whether our unbending expectations for the world make happiness less likely to find a home in us instead of more.

Maybe we’ll even try on the possibility that one great secret to cultivating happiness is to lower our lower our high and holy expectations of the world. There can be such delight in realizing that, most of the time, good enough is pretty darn great.

And this realization changes everything. This moment doesn’t need to be perfect in order for us to be happy. We need only shift our minds toward the possibility that - despite life’s difficulties and drudges - we can be happy in this moment, in this very breath. We need only open our eyes to the manifold gifts all around us, welcoming them with open arms. As Buddhist master Thich Naht Hanh wrote, “Happiness is available. Please help yourself.”