There is no mystery to happiness.
Unhappy men are all alike. Some wound they suffered long ago, some wish denied, some blow to pride, some kindling spark of love put out by scorn - or worse, indifference - cleaves to them, or they to it, and so they live each day within a shroud of yesterdays.
The happy man does not look back. He doesn't look ahead. He lives in the present.
But there's the rub. The present can never deliver one thing: meaning. The ways of happiness and meaning are not the same. To find happiness, a man need only live in the moment; he need only live for the moment. But if he wants meaning - the meaning of his dreams, his secrets, his life - a man must reinhabit his past, however dark, and live for the future, however uncertain. Thus nature dangles happiness and meaning before us all, insisting only that we choose between them.
The interpretation of a murder, Jed Rubenfeld
We are the sum of all the people that we ever met.
You change the tribe
and the tribe changes you
Fierce people
If after reading all the above you feel happy and complete and a bit sad at the same time, you have proven that nature doesn't force us to choose between happiness and meaning. In fact, I myself can experience something in the present that reminds me of the past and makes me laugh because of it, or gives more meaning to the experience because of it.
Happiness is not always necessarily the feeling you could jump with joy. It can be a more subtle feeling of cherishing what once was there, or rejoycing that something is not there anymore.
However, the concept of time is something that was forgotten here. The concept of time makes what I suggest almost impossible. Almost no one can handle the knowledge of the speed of time, the time waisted, the time that can never be regained...
(LB)
