Happy And Content

An article was posted: People who become happier and more content as they get older usually display these 7 behaviors

The behaviors:

1. Embracing Change
2. Welcoming solitude
3. Practicing gratitude
4. Staying active
5. Forgiving the past
6. Limiting material possessions
7. Nurturing relationships

I read the article and rated myself 1-10 on each. I got about half the points.

I consider myself to be a person who has achieved considerable personal growth, even mastery in most important areas of life.

I believe in and practice

1. Accepting, but not always embracing, Change
2. Accepting, but not particularly welcoming, Solitude
3. Appreciating life and often being grateful, but not practicing gratitude
4. Staying active
5. Forgiving quickly
6. Limiting material possessions
7. Valuing relationships, but often not nurturing them

Then I put it aside.

A few days later, a friend wrote:

I relate to some, but not all of this. And I am considered by most to be a happy person. I do enjoy solitude and trying new things. Not all change is good. It's important to be able to discern when change is worth embracing.

I was grateful for their comment. It made me realize and remind myself:

Happiness is worth enjoying, but often not valuable to pursue. In fact, the pursuit of happiness is one of the least effective ways of achieving it.

As for rating ourselves on this simplistic scale:
Perfection appears in many different forms. Its rating on any particular scale will vary.

The only purpose I can see in rating one's happiness or contentment is to identify lies one is living, that is, fictions one is limiting life with. One of the most common fictions is that one isn't good enough. (Unfortunately, one can easily and erroneously conclude this from not scoring a 7 out of 7.)

Being happy and being content are ways of being, which are actually things we can choose and change, moment to moment. If one can do this, why would they not? Because it's just a way of being, not superior to others.

Years ago, I studied eastern religion. There's no common personality of those who became enlightened masters. Teachers of enlightenment often display bliss and tranquility, but other masters often don't.

There's no superior way of being, just as there's no superior ego, emotion, body type, skin color, age, or language.

What's superior is being detached, not from life, but from ego. One is free to indulge the ego or not and to know that one's ego is not oneself. One is not the character one seems to be, but the actor playing the character, ad-libbing as one chooses.

As far as contentment is concerned, there's a lot of crap in the world. To be content with it, one would have to separatge oneself from humanity and the planet, or be ignorant of it or in denial, or lack empathy and concern for others, or create the false believe that one hasn't the power or responsibility to make the difference one sees is needed.

That article was written by someone whose goal is to write such articles. And in our happiness-addicted culture, it probably gets a lot of attention.

For someone seeking personal growth, perfect happiness and contentment can be a worthy goal to reach and pass through. But it's not the a suitable end-goal for most.