Wandering around chichester uni freshers fayre with my brother and his wife, we started looking through the posters in the sale, and found one with what i believe is a buddhist saying: As soon as i read it i knew it to be true, and could even relate the saying to the times in my life when i've felt sad. Allow me to explain that last bit: Sometimes you can start down a particular path in life, having found it to be a happy one. However, sometimes these paths are dead ends, and backing up to the last junction causes the reverse of the happiness originally felt - that is to say, sadness. Furthermore, after going through this period of reversing, I often experience a lack of any emotion for a few days, as i try to get back into a metaphorical forward gear. comments/thoughts? also, do you have any other sayings that you've found to be thought-provokingly accurate?
I'm not sure about thinking of life paths leading to dead ends then having to back up, I see it more as being happy with what you've got and were you're going. Never give up, never go back, never look back - always onwards.
Someone once gave me a journal with a similar quote on the front. I took it to mean, we can't always strive for happiness in the future. Looking onward is great for getting direction, but if we look only onward we may miss out. We have to look for happiness everyday in the world around us, lest it pass us by while we're striving for something that is already available.
It all fits, it's all about not getting stuck...either in looking at the past, or searching for the unattainable in the future, and just being happy NOW, always.
At work we have notepads that have random quotes about happiness printed accross the top (from the offer we had for broadband that included a happiness guarantee, see, it's not just innocent! ). The one I really liked, and really should have kept was this one by Ralph Waldo Emerson: others include : and one I really don't get:
