Jan 7, 2010
We continue to explore my suggested definition of happiness. Happiness has been notoriously hard to capture. One famous saying suggests you never catch happiness when you seek it directly, it only comes to you when you are busy doing other things, like a butterfly gently landing on your shoulder. I borrow a phrase from another writer who describes this slippery aspect of happiness as "transcending anticipation." Transcending means something that rises above the present moment, that stands beyond time. Anticipation is the feeling or desire that we want to arrive somewhere, achieve something, but we never quite get there. Jill is experiencing "transcending antipication" in the vague restlessness she feels. We look at what that is and where it comes from in this particular episode.
The next episode will be one of the most important I will ever post in this series. We will look at two questions. First, how can you tell when you are in the Plan or Process I talk about in my suggested defintion of happiness? Second, how do happiness and love fit together? We can pull together some of the key observations about love we have seen in earlier episodes and get a general view of love and happiness, a goal towards which we have been slowly working these past several months.
This podcast series is based on my book The Six Faces of Love which can be viewed at craigowen.net