I Don't Know Why We Are Here...

I've never understood people who think the universe is here for their specific pleasure.  Who raised these units of self-absorption to think their personal happiness is their birthright?  Perhaps it's a problem of semantics. 

Certainly happiness has many definitions; one needs only to look at the noodling done by the great philosophers to appreciate the complexities of the word.  On the other hand, philosophers are obliged to take any term and give it dimensions requiring exponential notation.  But that's another blog.

Narrow Thinkers (that's what I'll call them) can only have one definition for happiness:  Each part of my day works to my advantage and fulfills at least some of my desires, others allow my will to prevail or see that my needs are greater than their own, and all good things come to me with little or no effort on my part, as it should be.

Personally, I find communication with Narrow Thinkers to be very difficult.  We might actually inhabit separate universes.  They find no joy in the act of giving but see it only as an unpleasant duty, inhibiting their ability to acquire something for themselves. They feel no sense of pleasure when someone richly deserving receives, say, the Nobel Prize in Medicine posthumously.

Narrow Thinkers see no connection between themselves and the universe as a whole:  rules are meant for others, my littering is okay, I'll water my lawn if I want, this water shortage is BS, let someone else take care of the poor, my life is as hard as theirs. Yada Yada  We all know them.

If you professed to Narrow Thinkers that happiness can be found in hard work well done, in a spontaneous act of kindness, in writing a poem for someone's birthday, in watching a child's eyes the first time she sees a dolphin, in working in a soup kitchen or seeing Nelson Mandela walk out of prison, the look of incomprehension on their faces would support my separate-universe premise.  The "what's in it for me" question would be written all over their faces.

At a baby shower for a co-worker, someone asked me about the dish I brought.  It was an old family recipe that had taken some time to put together.  After describing the process I offered to e-mail the recipe and received a look that would have turned a spoon into a molten puddle.  The idea of putting forth that much effort for (gasp) someone else was absolutely foreign to her.

If this has made me look like some sort of pillar of virtue, it isn't my intent.  I have enough faults to fill several blog posts.  (You most likely will not see them on MY blog, however.)  This subject came to mind this morning based on a fb post from one of them.

Author Peter Hershey said, "I don't know why we are here, but I'm pretty sure that it is not in order to enjoy ourselves."  The Beginning of the End (2004) p. 109