Ongoing thoughts about happiness, pulled from a journal a few months ago...
I am more interested it what prevents happiness. Is it the same thing that prevents us from emotional progress- the inability to come to terms with parts of ourselves, parts of our past?
Joan Didion wrote of wandering through grief so eloquently:
“it was in fact the ordinary nature of everything preceding the event that prevented me from truly believing it had happened, absorbing it, incorporating it, getting past it” (4, Didion)
So how do we acknowledge the past and separate ourselves from it? This question seems like the difference between joy and happiness.
Happiness is a form of subjective well-being- an interpretation that is dependent on the event that person is surrounded by, as well as an inborn equilibrium or "core effect". If the situation is good, than the person will be happy- because they perceive their current situation as good.
Joy is usually reserved for elated sense of being that is detectable by other people, one could be in a situation that is not good- and this “joy” seems to come from “no where” or something deep and profound. Joy does not rely on the interpretation of the surrounding, it comes from God and a deep personal connection to the things that are “good”. Joy is much more dependent on one’s relationship with goodness, than daily interactions.
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