The duty to be happy

Every day at St. John's Center, we pray for all beings to be happy and create the causes for happiness. Have you ever stopped to think how happiness is actually a duty? It is really. Because unhappy people tend to cause other people to be unhappy too. So we do real harm in the world by being unhappy. Helen Keller is someone who understood this. Here is something she said:

Let pessimism once take hold of the mind, and life is all topsy-turvy, all vanity and vexation of spirit. There is no cure for individual or social disorder, except in forgetfulness and annihilation. "Let us eat, drink and be merry," says the pessimist, "for to-morrow we die." If I regarded my life from the point of view of the pessimist, I should be undone. I should seek in vain for the light that does not visit my eyes and the music that does not ring in my ears. I should beg night and day and never be satisfied. I should sit apart in awful solitude, a prey to fear and despair. But since I consider it a duty to myself and to others to be happy, I escape a misery worse than any physical deprivation.

Don't ever think that happiness is a matter simply of chance. We can take definite steps to cultivate happiness. A firm decision not to entertain resentment is undoubtedly key. Personally, I tell myself that I simply cannot afford it. It really doesn't matter whether the resentment can be justified or not. Please don't get into that debate because resentment will find a way to win every time. Realize, rather, that it will assuredly rob you of your happiness. It will. Oh yes, it will. And I would rather be happy any day.

Here's something else that Helen Keller said:

Many persons have a wrong idea of what constitutes true happiness. It is not attained through self-gratification but through fidelity to a worthy purpose.

For me that worthy purpose is applying the meditative principles to the way I work with my own mind and also helping other people to do the same. Everyone can have the application of meditative principles as his or her worthy purpose because we can apply them all day, every day no matter what our life's work happens to be.