Passion. Courage. Intelligence
The world “started” along time ago; civilization began many years before any of us were born. And it continues to this day. If the world tarries, development will continue for many more years to come. It is an on-going process; it is part and parcel of the evolution of humanity.
The reason is simple, human beings are creatively ambitious. It is in them to create; to want more even when they already have more. Development becomes the foundation for further development, shoulders on which subsequent development stands, and that is a good thing.
Human beings are goal oriented. Even the most lazy man or woman on the street has something they are looking forward to; a goal which they want to achieve. The interesting thing about goals is that they are perpetual; the accomplishment of one goal leads to a desire for the accomplishment of another goal that builds up on the first one; this is a natural process, a phenomenon that has brought us to where we are as individuals, people, organizations or nations.
You can bear testimony to the fact that you have had many goals in your life and yet even after you accomplished them, there were still more new things that you started looking forward to. In one of the books I was reading recently, it is recorded that many years ago, a member of the US senate wanted senate to pass a bill which would close the patent office because as far as he was concerned, there were never going to have any new inventions; according to him, everything that needed to be invented had already been invented and there was no need to keep the office open. If he only lived to see our time, this senator would have seen how wrong and short sighted he was! There is always something new on the horizon of time.
It is human nature to always look forward to this new thing; and this is a good thing. However, there is a tendency for people to “postpone” their happiness in pursuit of that which stands on the horizon; in the human experience, this is where the problem lies and this is an issue I want to address in this article.
Hear me, and hear me well; the secret to happiness is this: Happiness must never be postponed on account of any goal that is yet to be achieved.
Tying your happiness to the achievement of a specific goal is a self set trap with the potential of bringing misery without end. This is so because first and foremost, as we have said, you will always have goals – things that you want to achieve. Even after achieving those things, there is still more to achieve – we never really come to the end. So if you want to tie your happiness to individual goals yet to be fulfilled, you will never truly live a happy life because even after achieving those goals, there will still be more goals to achieve; your happiness will always be on the horizon but never in the moment.
Secondly and just as important, it is really not necessary to postpone your happiness on account of a goal yet to be achieved. If you are going to achieve your goal sometime in the future; let’s say, you are convinced that this is the goal that will bring happiness in your life; then there is really no point in waiting until that goal is manifested. You might as well get happy now about your impending grand achievement. It’s like saying, if you knew that you are going to get a million dollars tomorrow, do you surely have to wait until tomorrow to be happy? I don’t think so, your excitement would start today, and you would start visualization all the wonderful things that you are going to do with your million dollars and the impending lifestyle that awaits you. The point is that you would be happy immediately you know that you are going to get the million dollars.
This is the same way we ought to approach the things we yearn for in life. Desires are real; we cannot deny the fact that there will be things that we will look forward to. But what we should not do is to keep ourselves waiting happiness-wise; to postpone our happiness until such a time that these are manifested. We ought to find a way to bridge the life we have and the one we desire and are working towards. The best way to bridge the gap is to be excited in the now about the life that is to come.
In that moment, we not only begin to get excited about what is to come; because we are excited about what is to come in the now, we begin to get excited about our lives now and all the steps we have to follow through on to achieve our highest aims. It is at this place that we begin to “live our dream”.
I encourage you to break free from the habit of postponing your happiness; I call it a habit because it is something that you have learnt. A year ago, I had the awesome privilege of holding in my hands the wonderful gift of life; I held in my hands my son a few minutes after his birth. Guess what he had on this face … a smile. Yes, a few minutes old but with occasional smiles on his face. That is how we are all born, with a happiness attached to nothing.
As I look at my son now (1 year old at the time of writing this article), he is truly enthusiastic about the life he knows. His happiness is really not tied to any goal because at his age, obviously he doesn’t even have any goals. His is to live and live happily. That is where we all come from but as we grow; our minds become infected with race thought and the child within us dies even as we live. The resultant is what we have come to call adulthood. “Adults are nothing more than detorieted children”; gloomy and always chasing after the wind when all they need to do is re-connect with the happiness that only dwells in them.
Because of social conditioning, it can become a difficult thing to detach our happiness from future accomplishments. But this is something that we ought to do because it is necessary even for achievement of the very goal for which we hinge our happiness on. It will bring about the realization of this goal even faster. Easy has never been an option in life… and it was never the mother of invention. It doesn’t have to be easy; it only has to be necessary.
I wish to suggest one way that can get you on the path to connecting with your future goals without having to wait until they are realized for you to be happy. It will sound ridiculously simple but it is something that has worked for me; it is about a shift in perspective. An example will help.
Let’s assume you entered for a competition and a grand prize awaits the winner… and it has just been announced that you were the winner of the prize, wouldn’t you get excited about this announcement? Would you wait for the prize to be given to you before you could get excited? I honestly don’t think you would wait. You would burst into shouts of joy the moment the announcement is made. So it must be with your dream and the vision you have for your life. Get excited about it in the present moment.
Right here you find the real cause of postponing happiness – lack of certainty about the outcome. And lack of certainty is triggered by the bigger picture you hold about life. If you take life as an adventure, then even the lack of certainty becomes your ally; if you take life as a fight; you become tensed up and the lack of certainty about your outcome in life causes you to postpone your happiness. But that is for another article.
For now, all I am encouraging you is that you must make the journey a pleasure. That is where you will spend most of the time. Make it as pleasurable as possible. That is what it is all about.
I will leave you with some wise words from Mike Dooley, “To enjoy life means to enjoy the journey even though the journey itself implies that we are not complete”. You must learn to be happy even while you don’t have all you need because there will never be a time when you have all you need. Your current goals will be replaced by new ones once they are accomplished. This is the reason why happiness should not be tied to accomplishing of goals alone; there will always be some goals to be accomplished but not yet accomplished.
