The Locale of Happiness

locale of happiness

Epigraph:

Philosophy – simple premises that lead to small conclusions. Exploration and humility illuminating hand in hand our dark corners. Here be spiders.

Rhetoric – the spiders.

Table of Contents:

Chapter 1 – Reference

Chapter 2 - Truth

Chapter 3 – Love

Chapter 4 - Revisiting Reference - Truth

Chapter 5 - Revisiting Reference - Love

Chapter 6 - Interaction with Love

Chapter 7 – Sorting out the word Love

Chapter 8 - Lies

Chapter 9 - Humility

Chapter 10 - Faith

Chapter 11 - Hope

Chapter 12 - Happiness

Introduction:

I hate introductions. I always feel cheated. Like I am wasting my time.  A page 1 that isn't actually a page 1.

On top of that, most of the time it's regarding the author's life or credentials, which prior to actually reading the book honestly I couldn't care less about.

This book is about being human.

The premise: If we could improve our own self-understanding, would we be able to live better? To have better lives? Would we be happier? If such a thing exists, where is the locale of happiness? Is it the same or similar for all of us? Are we somehow related to each other and this thing, happiness, in a way that we can understand, at least in part? If we think there's a chance that we can understand the connection, where do we start?

Chapter one – Reference

The first thing that we should comment on is how amazing people are.  To forget that makes all this meaningless. We are powerfully complex beings. And, in as much of a internal conflict as freezer-burnt jumbo-shrimp; we are at the same time in ways very simple in nature. Each one of us unique; we are the product of a host of variables perfect in their diversity.

On top of that we don't have much to go on in the way of certainty. Knowing that we can sometimes be wrong we are forced to operate on a system of guess work for many parts of our lives.

In this pulsing, vying contradiction of an existence we find a host of data to champion almost any idea to some extent as truth for ourselves. 

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So in all this where do we start? If our quest is for happiness via self-understanding, where is the starting line?

Well the only place it really makes sense to start would be exactly where we all are right now. That's all we have. Our own perspective, our own reference. If we started anywhere else we wouldn't really be qualified to explore anything from that vantage point. Even if we could fly alongside a bird we still wouldn't be able to see the ground like they do. Their eyesight is on par with their ability to fly. We don't have those eyes because we don't fly. So a bird's eye view of our lives would only help to a certain degree. We would eventually fly too high to say anything intelligent about what is happening on the ground with our human eyes.

If we want to understand ourselves, we need to perform a self-analysis from our own perspective, with our own tools.

The combination of these things could be summarized as our reference. Each person's individual lens with which they view the world with all the variables that obfuscate or focus his or her thoughts, feelings, and sense of identify.