The Experiment – A 365 Day Search For Happiness

One year ago I set myself a task, to write for 365 consecutive days, an experiment, and the focus of the experiment was to be a search for happiness, but there was a problem. In seeking happiness as the goal I was rejecting the value of all of the other emotions, feelings, and experiences that would come, all of which are part of the human experience. It is not in longing for, searching for, or even finding happiness that we arrive at our destination but in embracing all the aspects of our humanity. I had to do this experiment for 365 days to realize that I had, though well meaning, approached the whole experiment from the wrong point of view, that there could be no successful outcome from such an experiment, and yet the experiment was a resounding success in that it taught me something very important. It taught me that if you commit to something and show up for it every single day magic happens, your life is changed, transformation takes place in a way that couldn’t happen any other way. And this first 365 days laid the groundwork for what is coming next. Today is both an end and a beginning. This last blog post is the launching pad for the next 365 days and, given that, I am truly happy with the outcome. Maybe I found the “happiness” I was looking for after all.

Happiness, in the traditional sense, is fleeting, it comes in moments, in singular experiences. In the best of times very hard things may happen, in the hardest of times untold joys may be found. Happiness then is not an endpoint, it is not something we achieve, it is something we experience, and I have experienced much happiness in the last year, more deeply felt, I now realize, because of the moments against which it stood in sharp relief, profound depression, sometimes paralyzing fear, disappointments, loneliness, and a sense of feeling lost. More, I have learned that it is not “happiness” that matters so much as a deep feeling of peace that grows from within, contentment, moments when one feels a sense of ease in the world and can take a full breath and simply relax. In this moment I am feeling a myriad of emotions. In this moment I am feeling afraid, tentative, shy, a little lost, and the early intimations of fleeting moments of happiness on the horizon. I am, though somewhat hesitant, embracing it all because we have no other choice. We choose life, and living fully, or we choose death, a kind of living death, when we so numb ourselves to the more difficult aspects of life that we miss all the beauty there is to experience as well. I have realized, just today, in deep contemplation and study, that I needed to return to the work that I was doing almost 30 years ago when I called my writing classes “Peeling The Layers Of The Heart.” The title for the classes was inspired by a quote from Tibetan Buddhist teacher Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche. He wrote…

“We must continue to open in the face of tremendous opposition. No one is encouraging us to open and still we must peel away the layers of the heart.”

Inotherwords this is not about a writing class any longer, it is a fundamental approach to life, and the basis for my next year’s journey on this blog. It is about compassion for ourselves and our lives and the world around us, from the tiniest things to huge, world altering things. It is about life and death and everything that comes in between the two and all of the little births and deaths we encounter every day. The beginnings and endings of things, all of the emotions, feelings, experiences, relationships, every aspect of our human existence. It is about having infinite compassion for it all, in fact that is the name of the next year’s project, Infinite Compassion. It has taken me 365 days to uncover what the next year’s journey should be and it could only come now, when I wasn’t looking for an answer but a way of living and being in the world, a continual becoming, peeling the layers to go deeper and deeper each and every moment of every single day. And I know that I will encounter tremendous opposition and there will be days so hard they will take my breath away and there will be joys greater than anything I can imagine in this moment. There will be everything, as there always is. It is life, it is what it is to be fully human, and there can be no other way to live but with a deep compassion for it all.

And so I want to end here by thanking all of you who have been with me these 365 days, it has meant more to me than you will ever know, and in this moment I am also extending my hand to those who will join me on the journey ahead, either as readers and commenters or those who are undertaking their own 365 day journey and will work along with me on their own parallel path. I welcome you all, I embrace you all, I am bowing to each of you, and sending you love and so much gratitude. It has been quite a year, now let us see what the next year will bring.