"You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of.

"You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. 
You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life." - Albert Camus


If anything would convict me of what I am doing wrong, it is the above quote from Albert Camus.


I have sought long and hard to discover what happiness is and what it is not.  I have looked everywhere for the meaning of life.   Yet, it is not in the search for these things that I find them.   In fact, happiness and meaning occur when I am not trying, not doing anything.  When I am just being.


I have written other blogs about being vs. doing, but this one is a little different.   I want to talk about how I am persuaded to do something to get results, rather than choose to be happy, to have meaning.


Why am I always doing something to find or discover or build something else?


I was taught throughout my life to "go out and get it!"  "Anything is possible with hard work."  "Nothing gets done by sitting on your butt."   These all are true.   They really are.   You cannot get a job if you sit on top of a mountain somewhere and commune with the universe.   Those jobs are already taken.  It is also impossible to fulfill your goals by doing nothing.   I agree wholeheartedly.   I think that this misses the point a little though.


When I act on something, a feeling, a motivation, a thought, I almost always include my ego with this decision.  This is not a good thing.   The ego wants to see results.  When that happens, the ego makes it difficult not to tie feelings of self-worth into whatever activity I am doing.


If I try for a job and don't get it, my ego is hurt.   I am unhappy.   Why?  Logically, the more interviews I go on, the closer to a job I get.   Why not celebrate the fact that I am one job closer to narrowing the field down to the job I will eventually find.    


If I try to be happy and I fail, then I not be happy.  This sounds simple, but anything I go for, anything I do to accomplish something means that I take the risk of not accomplishing it.   When that happens it affects my feelings of self-worth.   

On the other hand, when I am happy, or feel like I am living a meaningful life, the ego it not attached to that.   Why, because I am not doing anything.   How can the ego judge what works and what doesn't work; how can it get frustrated when there are no overriding goals, when there is no doing involved.

I read a little about something called the Law of Assumption.   It basically says that if you act as if you already have or are what you wish to be, that you will be that.   If you act from a place of peace, regardless of what you do, you bring peace with you to that activity.  


So I tell myself to go and make plans;  sketch out the future and do those things that need to be done.   In the process, I tell myself to act from a place of peace, out of a sense of abundance, with an assumption that I am a loving and caring being.   It makes the doing of things so much easier.   My ego is not tied as closely to the outcomes of doing things then.  My self-worth is not dependent on what I get or do not get accomplished.


The meaning of life happens in knowing.   The happiness of life is a choice to be happy.   Neither of them is a goal, a race or a contest to get them.   They are a choice, an act of will, a state of being.