I offer you a choice. Happiness or peace. Which one will make of your life the better experience, which one will see you find true fulfillment.
We are taught from childhood on that happiness is the most desirable state of being. As we grow however, we soon find that happiness is a difficult state to attain. Moreover, it seems to be both elusive and fleeting. When we question this, we are often told it is some fault in us that keeps happiness just beyond our reach. But is this in fact true?
Years ago, I found a poet who had struggled with this very dilemma. “Moments” by Hervey Allen expresses this very conflict. In part he writes, “And once I thought, Quick instances such as these, That my new senses caught, Were promises of vivid days to be …” As a child, you feel those spurts of happiness and the rush is not unlike a good shot of adrenaline. You want that feeling to expand, last, to encompass your days. That doesn’t happen though.
“Those days never come. And now I know, That in this world of ours, Such moments never grow, Into a day – Not even into hours – They are as rare and brief as desert flowers.”
But what of peace? Much is said about it and we are taught it is a desirable state. Yet no one ever really teaches you the depths peace can offer. Consider if you will what true peace of the self and soul might mean.
Peace is not merely a surcease from war or conflict. To know peace, you must also have sufficient means to secure oneself against threat of hunger, loss of hearth and home. Peace entails the knowledge one is accepted as one is and loved, for all of that.
True personal peace stems not merely from a laying down of arms. True peace is found in the easing of physical needs and the satisfaction of emotional ones. In having these needs met, you find the room to breathe, to grow in ways and directions that were previously mere wisps of dreams.
It is from peace and the necessary particulars that make peace possible that you will find happiness. Better still, from such peace there might well grow a deeper personal joy that, unlike happiness, is not momentary. Joy permeates and infuses one’s life. In its quiet way, joy is the expansion of happiness to fill all those moments, days, and hours happiness cannot.
I have thought on this choice for years now. I think I rather choose peace than happiness. It is certainly a harder state to attain but peace offers a greater depth of experience and possibility than simple happiness ever can. To know peace through and through, to feel it to the very depths of one’s self and soul … now there is a goal worthy of the effort.