A Complete Life
Mini-guide to happiness?
These are some thoughts I had this morning.
At every stage of life there are challenges to face and lessons to be learnt.
Your success (or not) at identifying and overcoming or learning them has a big effect on your next stages, and also on your happiness.
None can be skipped or avoided. In later life, if you haven’t learnt from previous ages, have not overcome the challenges, then you won’t find happiness except as a fleeting thing that is quickly lost again.
This is not a full summary of the challenges and lessons. That would be a book.
This is just a few observations.
Childhood Lessons
We need to learn about sharing. It may begin with toys and time, but as adults it blooms into a realisation of sharing the Earth with all other life.
Kindness to others: human or not, different from us or not. In adulthood this can bloom into full empathy.
Avoiding the development of prejudice. We should learn that the physical facts of a birth have no relevance. Skin colour, sex, appearance. All that matters in terms of evaluating another person is their personality and behaviour. Who we are and what we do, not how we are born and what we look like. It’s a vital discernment to begin understanding.
Children question everything. This is good. We must keep that attitude into later life, and not lose it.
(As an aside, one of the signs of authoritarian and exploitative regimes is that they don’t want people to question the status quo, hence you will see philosophy (and classics) departments at universities marginalised, defunded and closed. They are replaced with “practical” courses instilling materialistic assumptions and viewpoints, the internalisation of which are a requirement for completing the courses. Those who insist on questioning the basic tenets will be failed and thrown out. Authoritarians don’t want people with imaginations, don’t want people who question their presentation of history and culture, don’t want people who can imagine alternatives. It’s how we can live in an alliance of Western cultures built on war, genocide, settler colonialism, capitalism and exploitation, and massive inequality, yet have a huge population so unused to questioning propaganda that they believe we are the “good guys”. Authoritarian regimes want obedience, attained partly through conformity; a culture of conformity comes from framing things a particular way, whilst also discouraging questioning attitudes.)
Teenage And Adulthood Lessons
We build on previous lessons, learn more, face other challenges.
We should develop a balanced personality. Since it works as a metaphor, I still think of it as finding a balance between the childish, impetuous, demanding id; the superego; and the conscious ego that is “us”. Even in adults I see people who never achieved this balance, who feed their id with negativity and hand it control, externalising their anger and making themselves unhappy whilst blaming it on others. They can never be happy until they balance it, and they can’t balance it until they acknowledge that there is a problem.
Adults must continue to question everything, a lesson from childhood.
They must also remember to keep their playfulness, and not lose it. The same with the wonderful imaginations they had as children. It is easy to pass a stage but then lose it again later. Each challenge is like planting a tree, and seeing it grow for the rest of your life. Planting a tree then cutting it down leaves you worse off than when you started.
Realise that we must try to make the world a better place (referring to human actions). Compassion requires action.
And yet, we must also realise we only have limited power to change the universe. We may not be able to control everything that happens, but we do have a lot of control over how we react to it, and how it affects us. And how, over time, we can improve and strengthen our resilience.
Adults must have learnt to have gratitude for everything good in their lives, rather than focussing mostly on what they lack, want, or are unhappy about. You can never be happy if you only yearn for what you do not have.
Adults continue to develop their willpower, which gives them the inner strength to face challenges and do the right thing, to resist temptation.
They continue to develop their appreciation that happiness is not from possessions, it is from being a good person, from loving and being loved, from seeing their value and place. Happiness is from inner things, not outer.
Hopefully from all of that comes wisdom. Wisdom is a far more important attribute than the insubstantial concept of “intelligence”, which is mostly just a measure of how much you conform to the dominant culture.
Seniority
In the final stages of our lives we still have vital challenges, but if we have done well in earlier ones they will be much easier.
One of the final challenges is preparing for death. But not as a negative thing, as an ever-encroaching horror.
Some people will never come to terms with it, especially those who have spent their life focussed on materialism, on selfishness. They will see nothing beyond but oblivion. Or, perhaps (if they adopt an organised religion later in life) the possibility of being judged, and going to a bad eternity. And the knowledge that repentance just out of selfish reasons is not true repentance and will not sway the judgement. A life spent selfishly has too much momentum, and at that point they are trapped.
But a person who lived their life with wisdom, and kindness, and acceptance, will have another view. They will come to terms with their place in the whole. They will have perceived the cycles. The shared joys and sufferings of all life. The endless connections of all things, which means they are never alone. Connections that do not end when a heart stops beating.
And they will also have come to terms with their limits, the impossibility of knowledge. They will accept that. Their imagination may suggest possibilities, but they won’t be worried by the fact that possibilities and imaginations are all they can ever be, prior to death.
Death will not be faced with fear, but acceptance. Not shoved away in horror but embraced. Not hated and feared but loved and welcomed. It is the end of suffering and striving. It is the return to the life force that originally gave us a precious spark to tend for.
Those that learn this lesson can die with a smile on their lips. Regardless of what conditions they were born into, they can look back on a life well lived, a loving life, a kind one, a strong one, one they can be humbly proud of whether they meet a maker or not. That is the inner power that wisdom leads to, the calmness to face the greatest of all challenges with equanimity and beauty.
PS I’m also an author. You can buy my books, or subscribe to my newsletter. I’m grateful for either. :-)
Beautiful timely essay Karl