I can honestly say I love my friendship with this woman. She is wonderfully insightful and has really gotten my brain cells fired up with her blog posts. She has a very interesting mind.
What is happiness? What is success? We struggle with both of these concepts all of our lives but I think more in defining them than actually achieving them.
As God in Bruce Almighty Morgan Freeman once shouted: "Since when the HELL do people know what they want?" Its a very profound statement and one that has stuck with me. It ranks right up there with Alec Guiness portrayal of Obi-Wan-Kenobi saying: "You'll find that a great many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view." When combined I think, these quotes both represent the problem and solution to the happiness/success dilemma we all face.
First of all finding out what we want is the problem. When we're children we want late bedtimes, lots of sugar and to romp and play with our friends be it outside or on social media. As adults we want to be successful. As children our wants are simple, cut and dry and easy to achieve. As adults our wants are vague, poorly defined and as such impossible to achieve. What happened? How did our wants become so complex? Life as a child really is not all that much different from life as an adult, we satisfy our needs, we accomplish tasks and we work together in groups. The biggest difference is responsibility. As a child we are not always responsible for our needs. We have family members who provide much of that for us. In return they simply ask that we accomplish certain tasks called "chores." As adults we are more responsible for our needs but only slightly so. After all we have others who provide resources for us to satisfy our needs as long as we accomplish certain tasks called "a job." In retrospect the only thing that separates a child from an adult is the number of tasks they are required to accomplish. A child's chores may take an hour or two a week while an adult works for 40 hours a week. Children are generally happier than adults. Is this because they have more play time and fewer tasks? Certainly not. Ask any unemployed adult today and you will find they are quite miserable. This raises one very important question: What is the real difference between adulthood and childhood that makes being happy as a child easy while being happy as an adult eludes us?
That leads me to the solution.
Truths are in fact dependent on our own point of view but only insofar as what they mean to us. Global warming is fact but it means different things to different people. A scientist may see an interesting, albeit very important problem to solve. A coal miner might see the end of his livelihood while a politician sees a hot-button issue to get people to vote for him/her. This is very much the same in life. We all believe that success equals happiness but for one person that may mean they have more money, for another it may mean they can travel anywhere in the world they want. For me success is publishing my own webcomic. For you its probably something entirely different. But for those of us that have accomplished our goals are we automatically happy? I can honestly tell you no, publishing my own webcomic has not automatically made me happy. It does fill me with a sense of pride knowing that I have done this but happiness is in fact something different. I personally believe happiness is enjoying the life you live above and beyond carrying out your responsibilities. That's why we are happier as children, we can eshew our responsibilities in life seemingly at will and have no cares after our chores are done. As adults we seem to loose that ability. Even after we get home we still have to cook, to clean, to pay the bills, to dress the kids, make sure we get enough sleep, etc., etc. We feel like we don't have enough time to truly enjoy the life we have been gifted with because our focus as adults is only on those responsibilities of staying alive.
Is that success? I daresay NO.
As children we were told to enjoy our childhood because as adults it would all come to an end. To that I call bullshit. As a child I lived for video games, comic books and Saturday morning cartoons. As an adult I once made a living playing video games, I have my own webcomic and enjoy watching anime at any time that I want. It is these things that make me happy. Why? Because they made me happy when I was a child. It is truly ironic that I didn't feel like I grew up until I re-embraced my childhood.
So in the end success, true success is not only accomplishing your goals but also allowing yourself to be the person you truly are, the person your inner child is screaming at you to be. It is in this state that you are truly "awakened."