- Thomas Bien
Chasing Lizards
Chasing Lizards
With winter weather here, my dog is deprived of one of his most cherished pastimes: chasing lizards. Is he actually happier when he catches them, I wonder, or is the fun in the chase? When he actually gets the lizard and chews on it, it makes him sick. Not much fun. It seems the process is the fun.
I am reminded of the saying that there is no way to happiness, happiness is the way. Dogs can be a reminder.
Are you working on a goal or two? Finding a partner, getting a degree, buying a house? Or even just finishing some bit of work that’s on your desk? Making it to lunch?
Don’t imagine that you can only be happy at that time. For one thing, you might not notice any increase in happiness when you attain the goal, large or small. And because of something known in psychology as hedonic habituation, even if you do experience an incremental change in your happiness, it likely won’t last very long.
Such a realization is embedded in some of our familiar slogans, such as “life is a journey, not a destination?” Why are such sayings trite?
It’s because they’re true! (Hence another trite saying: “trite but true”).
Enjoy whatever lizards you’re chasing today.
Recent Posts
See AllA colleague once reported that a young person he knew had died by suicide. He lamented that we don’t reach out and ask for help, and wondered why this is so. I know why this is so. The truth is peopl
We are exposed to so much noise. This noise takes many forms. Some of it is silent, like our perpetual reading of stuff on our phones and computers. This noise only feeds the inner noise—the contin
I usually talk to people about the alaya in the context of managing emotions: as seeds of emotion manifest in the mind, arising from the alayavijnana or store consciousness, we take care of it by rais
