I finished Mattheiu Ricard’s book about Happiness today. The book was very enjoyable and was of high quality. In one of the last chapters there was a great metaphor that I would like to share, below is an adaptation.

Imagine that you are a pirate on the sea looking for gold. In the distance you spot an island, “Land Ho!” When you arrive on the island, what you see amazes you. The island itself is made of nuggets of gold. You look and look, and you cannot find a single pebble of granite rock.

In the metaphor you are the pirate looking for happiness. Gold is your happiness, and when you stumble on the island, you see that your whole life is happy. You look and look for granite pebbles, or problems and negative feelings, but you cannot find them.

This metaphor makes sense when you realize that you have the power to look at any given fact from different perspectives. No matter what the situation, you can always see it’s different aspects.

Happiness is possible everyday because of your creative, agile mind and its ability to see things from different perspectives.

What is less true about the metaphor is that you can “look and look” and not find the negative aspects of a situation. Finding the negative aspects of any situation is very easy; we do it all the time. For many, looking at the negative aspects is automatic. 

Your agile mind can find the negative or positive aspects of any situation. Develop the mental habit of momentarily acknowledging negative aspects and then spending time dwelling on the positive aspects of your life.         

Discuss this post in the Happy Forum. Learn more about these ideas at the Happy Wiki.

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 26th, 2007 at 3:46 pm and is filed under Happiness. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.