Troy Lamerton

Sustainable happiness

1 May 2016

This week's chapter started by introducing different facets of sustainable and fleeting happiness. Pleasure is the impulisive quick thrill seeking mind, the one that buys chocolate at the supermarket checkout. Passion is the experience of beig in the moment, fully challenged and engaged with a task that is not too difficult. Higher purpose is living by core values and altruistic beliefs. It is the most sustainable form of happiness. It's clear that passion and purpose will lead to a more furfilled life. Pleasure is a lot easier to chase but won't last like the others do.

To approach understanding what my higher purpose is, I journaled about my core values and what I stand for. Creating human connections is important to me and I value inspiring others to be better versions of themselves. I stand for the right of all people to be understood and included in society. I want to live by these values even when the easy choice is to compromise or conform.

Learning about resilience showed me how much there is to develop to have a stable life. On a positive note, it all looks like a process one can follow and achieve with mindfulness making up a large part of it. The meditation exercise that accompanied this aimed to help seperate the link between the thoughts of a remembered experience and the emotions associated with it. I remembered a failure and a success, in turn, and noticed the emotions and their representation in my body afterwards. Like any mindfulness exercise, it helped me calm mylsef and I think it will be useful when I experience emotions in a similar context.