We all want to be happy.
According to the dictionary definition, happiness is a state of well-being and contentment: joy. Feeling or showing pleasure or contentment. It is a pleasurable or satisfying experience, felicity, good fortune, wealth or prosperity.
Happiness is a state, not a trait. It isn’t a long-lasting, permanent feature but a more fleeting, changeable state.
Happiness is equated with feeling joy or contentment, meaning that happiness is not to be confused with pleasure, ecstasy, bliss, or other intense feelings.
Happiness can be either feeling or showing, an internal or external experience.
Happiness is a state characterized by contentment and general satisfaction with one’s current or momentarily situation.
Most significantly, happiness is an individual and changing matter.
Happiness is undefinable, and it means something different for everybody. And even for the same individual, it may mean something else in various circumstances and moments in life.
Recently I saw an Orthodox church service, and the preaching priest told a parable.
The demons of this world want humans to be unable to find happiness. They wanted to hide happiness somewhere where they could never find it.
One demon proposed to hide happiness at the top of the highest mountain. The chief demon said no mountain was high enough humans could not reach. Humans are nosy, they can climb everywhere, and they will find it. Another demon suggested that they should sink happiness to the bottom of the deepest ocean. The chief demon once again said that humans could develop advanced technologies, they will build submarines, and there is no ocean deep enough that humans could not explore and find it.
After hours and hours of debate, they could not reach a resolution.
There was a small demon who was not speaking. The chief demon asked him: what do you believe? I think, the small demon said, that we should hide happiness at a place where humans will never believe it exists, and therefore they will never manage to find it.
All the demons were impressed. Good proposal, the chief demon said, but where is such a place?
I think we should hide happiness inside the human soul, said the small demon. They will never manage to find it because they will never believe it can be found there.
The Tarot’s Devil card is our unsuccessful quest for external happiness.
We are looking for something in places where it cannot be found.
Happiness is not a hole we can fill up.
Happiness cannot be bought, borrowed, replaced or stolen.
Perhaps, the modern human’s greatest drama is that happiness cannot be quantified or measured.
And yet, often, the greatest joy is to make somebody else happy.
What is your ‘devil’ and what makes you happy?
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