3. Can our current happiness ever be independent of our happiness with our past actions, or are they one in the same? And if they are inextricably related, what is their relationship? Do our past action and our opinions of them allow us to be happy - or not - in the present day? Or do our moods in the present day color how we view ourselves yesterday?
posted by Pascals Bookie @ 6:10 PM
3 Comments:
Happiness is certainly dependent on past actions.
I posit that one is not truly happy if one is constantly second-guessing their past, because implicit in that is "if only I had done X differently, Y would be different now." To be deeply unhappy with one's past is to be unhappy with one's present as well.
The reason I ask is, while feeling generally regretful of all of my past actions (which readily come to mind in times of fretfullness) I would easily forget or cast them off in times of happiness. I might be individual in this regard, but I feel like self judgment might be flattened, taking the excitement/pleasure/contentment of the present moment as well as the events of the past and the hope for the future, and one's spin on any of these things can change from moment to moment, given the mood of the present.
Of course they are related. Everyone at some point regrets their past actions. Anyone who says they doesn't is either lying or horribly lacking in self-awareness (or perhaps has never left the house). What matters is how we allow those regrets to effect us in the present. A healthy person can detach themselves from those regrets, recognizes them as mistakes made in the PAST which are therefore unchangeable and attempts to learn from them in order to improve themselves. An unhealthy person (often due to a chemical imbalance) is unable to detach themselves from those past regrets and sees them as so intrinsically linked with today that they are unable to truly be happy with their present lives.
The "casting off" of these regrets is completely natural when one is in a state of happiness/excitement. Perhaps this is simply due to the human brain's inability to think of too many things at the same time. Maybe one strong emotion at a time is all we can handle. But obviously we all want to be happy so when the mood strikes we tend to pounce on it, desperate for any chance to put away the "heavier" thoughts for another time.
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