By Lida Prypchan
In a fashion magazine, an article appeared about depression, and at the end it said, “how to be happy again.” In order to find happiness again, they recommended, in addition to a good diet and being careful with the use of stimulants, to “take a short and fast walk or swim 50 meters in a pool to improve your life expectancy.” How can happiness, considered by philosophers to be non-existent, be resolved by a magazine with a short 50-meter swim? The focus is superficial, correct?
As Benevente said: “Happiness does not exist in life … There are only happy moments.” Looking for something non-existent, as in the case of happiness, is as absurd as wanting to see a country where all the inhabitants are happy with the political system. It is just as unrealistic to think that we will never be sad or to think when confronted with an unfortunate experience that we will never feel happy again. The reasons for feeling sadness or happiness vary in each individual due to their tastes, their outlook on life, their age, and their problems and needs. For an Oriental, a moment of happiness can be something that would never dawn upon a Westerner as such and vice versa.
Although happiness does not exist, happy people do exist. For this, what one needs to do is to not analyze anything, and the people who are happy are precisely those for whom the word “analysis” does not exist in their mental structure. The foregoing is best explained with what some people say about happiness: “the only happy people are idiots, those who have no conflicts, or those who have them but are unaware of them” And the world is well populated with them! Those who have the problem have posed questions regarding their existence, life, and, consequently, are those who have conflicts. And it is precisely these latter people who know the joy of discovering great things, experiencing the grandeur of life itself, or feeling the deepest disappointment with it, but after revisiting their path and analyzing it.
If all human beings were happy and people were without conflicts, literature would never have existed. The French writer Simone de Beauvoir writes about this in her book The Woman Destroyed, “Happy people have no history. I could not tell the story of a character with no problems, no doubts, no questions asked, and full of joy, simply because such a character exists but does not live. “
What is certain is that we all seek moments of happiness in some form and consecrate our lives to what makes us feel better. Some find great satisfaction saving the lives of others or by dedicating themselves to art or religion or in many cases by making great sacrifices, hoping through this to achieve one last wish. Regarding this last case, there is a story of a young saint who decided to renounce all of his desires until he achieved the capacities necessary to travel from Poland to Rome, in order to look upon His Holiness, the Pope. After many years of sacrifice, he felt his heart cleansed of everything personal and walked miles and miles over plains and hills until he saw the gates of the Eternal City (his most cherished dream). Now about to enter, he reconsidered and said to himself:
“I, who have refused myself so many pleasures, will I not crown my piety by denying myself entry into Rome and the contemplation of the Saintly Father’s face?” And he became a victim of his own habit, retracing his path back to the village from where he had departed. Add the story that when he was again in his home, his mind became unhinged, and he became a furious maniac for the rest of his days.
