Reading

Lately I have been reading about happiness and freedom, albeit the definition of both is often vague, transient, and very subjective. Freedom for me does not equal being free from responsibility or bounded values and principles that we live by; it is more about freedom of time and spirit.  

In Chapter 102 Like the Moon in the Sky, from the book Your True Home, the Every Day Wisdom of Thich Nhat Hanh,  it says that if you are a free person, happiness can come over to you without you having to seek it. 

To cultivate the freedom, you should try to be free from your own concepts and ideas.  My own experience of not feeling ‘free’ was exactly like that.  As we are bounded often by our upbringing values we often create for ourselves a wall of boundary, a wall that is, though invisible, strong and hard to demolish.  

But…  As Thich Nhat Hanh says, if we don’t get go of the ‘concepts’ and ‘ideas’, we can never be free; if we are not free, it is not easy for happiness to come by.

In The Little Book of Lykke, by Meik Wiking (who wrote previously The Little Book of Hyggie), Wiking wrote that there are two states of happiness: the affective dimension, and the cognitive dimension.

The affective dimension – or hedonic – dimension examines the emotions people experience on an everyday basis; the cognitive dimension requires people to step back and evaluate your life overall. So when we ask ourselves about the level of our happiness, the cognitive dimension gives more away.

As the founder of the Happiness Research Institute, Wiking explores key areas of our lives that affect the level of our happiness:  togetherness, money, health, freedom, trust, and kindness.  I really love the freedom chapter as it offers so much clarity regarding which elements of freedom shall be my focus of pursuit. 

I had the quest, or rather, confusion about what freedom and happiness mean, and how I can bridge the incongruence between what I value and how I live. Somehow the two books provided the clarity for me.

From that sense, I have found the journey of picking up a book a fascinating and mysterious one. There seems to be an invisible force or draw, which lead me to decide what books to read.  Though similar to people entering into our lives, some books we read and let them pass by, some we would like to read and keep for life, I am glad to have had the opportunity to read both.