Happiness

"happiness is all you wanted" -Rhett Miller

Happiness is an interesting fish. How do you describe it? Plus, it’s not something that everyone can get the same way, which makes it all the more elusive.

I often spend time pondering the question, “how can I be happy?” There aren’t any simple answers. Sometimes I wonder if ignorance isn’t bliss; if I didn’t think so much about what it was like to be happy maybe I could attain it. It often seems like the happiest people are those least troubled by the world, and a lot of the time those people are the ignorant.

How do you find it?

How do you keep it?

I often come back to the idea that love and happiness are inter-related and important to one another. Is to love to be happy? No, it seems like being happy is simpler than that, even more basic if that’s possible.

"happiness is not a fish that you can catch" -Our Lady Peace

Faith & Doubt

I’ve had a growing interest in the definition of words and word usage lately. What I’ve been thinking about just recently is, if you can describe how a word is used, do you have a definition? This led me to ponder the following.

Does the word faith have an inherent element of doubt in it?

That’s my question. It seems that one could say, Faith = strong conviction in something you fear could be wrong or fail. This is an interesting description of faith. Take two examples:

Sometimes you’ll hear, “I have faith in humanity,” or, “I have faith in the U.S. dollar.” Both of these statements imply that the person has a strong belief in these two things (humanity and money), but doesn’t it also seem like these statements convey a general doubt that they could fail? When you hear someone use the phrase, “I have faith in humanity,” it’s not as if they are saying they know that humanity will always act in good ways. It seems more like they’re saying, “I think humanity will do good, but I have some deep seeded doubts myself.” Same with the dollar; that person is saying, “I think this paper money will continue to be valuable, but there is a remote possibility that it won’t.”

So does this mean that the phrase, “I have faith in God,” translates to, “I think God will do good, but I have my doubts”? Originally, I thought it might translate to, “I think there is a God, but I’m not entirely sure.” But the interesting thing about the statement, “I have faith in God,” is the implied existence of God.

The God part is not doubted in the statement, “I have faith in God;” rather it is the properties or actions of God. This is the same with the money and humanity examples as well; the doubt is in the actions and value of humanity and the U.S. dollar, respectively, not their existence.

On Love

Love is an interesting fish to be quite honest with you.

You can't really define it; it's hard to even describe it.

The part of love that I was thinking about was the oft-used, pseudo-deterministic "we are meant to be together" line. This is what really sparked me to start thinking about this topic.

In particular, I found the word "meant" to be very interesting. The dictionary defines meant as "To design, intend, or destine for a certain purpose or end." However, this doesn't really seem to me to be the way that people use the word meant.

When people say "we are meant to be together" they mean meant in the way that people normally mean supposed to. They're actually saying "we are supposed to be together,"which is kind of an interesting way to think about it because they aren't actually saying that it's going to happen (like you would expect the word meant to mean). Rather, they mean that it should happen, or it's expected to happen, or that they want it to happen.

People are using this crazy phrase, "we are meant to be together," as if it is deterministic, as if it's going to happen and there's nothing you can do about it. But the way the phrase is actually conveyed it basically means "I want us to be together." It's amazingly no deeper than that. It's not calling out to a higher power, saying that some grand plan is causing us to come together and that we are meant for each other. It's just one person saying to another, "I think we should be together."

Even if the phrase is altered slightly, like to "we were meant to be together," all that would translate to would be: "we should've been together already." Using the past tense were is only saying that something should have already happened, but it hasn't. That instantly would rule out any determinism in the statement.

I really find this to be incredibly interesting, especially since I have, even recently, thought of the phrase "we are meant to be together" to be a sign that the person believes in some grand plan or something greater than themselves. But just by examining word usage it becomes fairly clear that this isn't necessarily what the person means. Intriguing...I'll have to look into this more in the future.