11. Meaning and happiness

With the success of my last blog I thought I would put something else on here...not sure if the same amount of reaction will occur but lets see....There is no mystery to happiness. Unhappy men and women are are all alike. Some wound they suffered long ago, some wish denied, some blow to the pride, some kindling...spark of love put out by scorn- or worse, indifference- cleaves to them, or they to it, and so they live each day within a shroud of yesterday. The happy wo/man does not look back, s/he doesn't look ahead, s/he lives in the present.The present can never deliver one thing: meaning. The ways of happiness and meaning are not the same. To find happiness, a wo/man need only live in the moment; s/he need only live for the moment. But if s/he wants meaning- his dreams, secrets, life- a wo/man must reinhabit his/her past, however dark and live for the future. Thus nature dangles happiness and meaning before us all, insisting only that we choose between them. Is there a balance? is there a common side of such extremes?...The intellectual, the inward soul, sensitive enough to see the spiritual world but not strong enough to bear the burdern it imposes. The reality of life sinking in and striking at the need of the material at hand...the need to live in the "real". The challenge is to do both: to hear the voices of the other world but live in this one...I think...