The unhappiness of seeking happiness

Today, I am thinking about how happiness and unhappiness are not exactly opposites. The distinction is not meaningless, but more and more I think that happiness cannot being knowingly uncovered while unhappiness is predictable in our seeking.

Our seeking brings about the lists: the lists of society, our parents and ourselves. The scroll grows longer and longer as I say to myself, "If I can just lay it all down neatly, I can work towards and attain the happiness, that promised fruit." The spinning wheel would tell us that once we master the way of eating, sleeping, breathing, having sex and picking our noses we will have happiness. It is simply practice and effort away.

I think the reality is that we find happiness in the most unexpected of places. Not when we are doing nothing or because we finally found time to "relax," but when we are investing in something beyond happiness. Meaning can drive us to do a number of painful things, but the negatives to not negate. Meaning does not dilute in suffering or disappear when we are at our meanest. 

No amount of sheer mental force can make us happy, but there are many good questions of meaning to which we can put our minds. It won't be a haze of happiness, but it won't be unhappiness, either. 

Who you should vote for

Every candidate worth voting for is absolutely being deliberate and intentional with their words and actions as they campaign for your vote.

I would like to encourage everyone, no matter the candidate(s) you feel most aligned with in any political race (Newsflash: you've got a lot of other items on your ballot beyond and before the president), spend sometime investigating and learning the rhetorical techniques that are being deployed by their campaigns.

Rhetoric and logic are being used and misused to sway you. Again, I say, candidates worth voting for are speaking with intention, seeking to disseminate something specific.

As voters, we have to ask: What is that intention? Is it to share their message and show us how our values overlap with theirs? Is it to flare our emotions, asking us to lead with our fears or our hopes instead of our principals and reason? Is it to disguise true motivations and intentions?

I'm not asking you to dismiss a candidate because you realize they've been thoughtful in how they communicate with you; I'm asking that we all be critical of our instincts, the quick leaps to group identity that we may feel in the midst of politicking.

What has a candidate or campaign said that makes that sense of identity and representation become strong and clear in your mind? Can you name it? These are hard things to do. It can require us to turn a critical lens towards a movement or a figure who makes us feel comfortable and validated in our worst instincts of fear, hatred and selfishness.

I say that any candidate who is worth voting for is using rhetoric and logic in deliberate ways because the people worth voting for are those who have deep purpose in what they seek to achieve in public service. They do not take that purpose lightly.

They are and will be careful with their thoughts, words and deeds--not to be "politically correct", not to avoid offending our sensibilities, but because they have conviction in their beliefs and they don't want to mislead. They seek to communicate honestly so that we might vote for them with clear minds and resolute confidence in our choices.

I don't know how many candidates we may each see of that caliber in our lifetimes; I hope they are many. Still, I acknowledge that they will likely be few and far between, buried behind those who conceal their beliefs in pretty packaging. We must question them and question our instincts to identify with them. We must be open to the fact that the ones who make us most comfortable are actually the best at making us complacent and distracted.