Happiness is Inward and Not Outward-Daily Meditation 12.13.22
Today’s quotation:
Happiness is inward and not outward, so it does not depend on what we have but on what we are.-Henry Van Dyke
Today’s Meditation:
This is a basic premise of happiness, a repeated principle that we should continue to remind ourselves of. Happiness is, indeed, an inside job. We cannot make ourselves truly happy with anything we own or possess, but only through a deep and abiding knowledge and love of ourselves, our world, and our place. We can only be happy by making our thoughts happy, for our thoughts guide us through life and bring more of life.
During our time here on this planet, we will become something. Each day that we live, we become something and someone new. That person we inside determine what we do, what we give, whom we help, and how we help them, and that comes only from inside. Who we inside determine our character, helps or hinders us from finding peace, pushes us forward or pulls us back, and keeps us on a sane and healthy road or leads us down unhealthy and destructive paths.
Our inside lives lead us to make decisions on every aspect of living, and those decisions inevitably lead to results with which we must live. None of our possessions can help us to make such decisions, and while our friends can give advice, the final decision always is our own. And it always will come from the person we’ve become, the person we’ve made ourselves into based on our previous decisions.
Develop your character and become the person you truly want to be, and you’ll find that happiness results as a by-product. Search for happiness by building your stock of possessions or by trying to find it in outside sources. You will find that happiness is not there; you may get momentary satisfaction on a surface level, but deep happiness will evade you.
Questions to consider:
How does the momentary satisfaction of getting something nice make us think it’s “happiness”?
In what ways can we develop our happiness?
Why do so many people find happiness to be something difficult to achieve when it’s there inside us all the time?
For further thought:
Happiness is not a possession to be prized, it is a quality of thought, a state of mind.-Daphne DuMaurier
If you missed yesterday’s Daily Meditation, you can see it here.
