Although the nature of life is such
There's an inevitable encounter with confusion, fear, doubt, suffering...
This is why eudaimonic happiness must be created, then revered.
That indestructible deep Golden Core
Which once achieved is the actual eternal
Untouchable by pain.
Your focus.
Then, regarding others always in mind of life's struggles and their potential.
Compassion, with high standards.

I’ve always been fascinated by metaphorical language, especially when metaphors are used to try to grasp something imprecise that would otherwise escape from our hands.

(In fact, just like my sentence above).

I’m awe-stuck by the fact that human language has existed for millennia, and the scientific method of describing, defining, and communicating phenomena has existed for centuries, and yet the human race still turns to metaphors, even for some of the most important concerns.

One of these is the way we try to make sense of happiness and how to live a flourishing, excellent life.

After all, what could be of greater import to the human experience than happiness and a life of excellence? It’s what everyone generally wishes for those they care about the most.

Yet human happiness and excellence are strange. And our metaphors seem to just add to the cacophony.

The paradox of happiness

I believe part of why happiness often eludes us is that it involves an inherent paradox.

Happiness requires us to be simultaneously satisfied and dissatisfied.

On the one hand, happiness requires gratitude, savoring, and a focus on all the beauty and blessings of the present moment. On the other hand, happiness requires growth and a focus on all the ways we can grow and develop our potentialities in the future.

The Ancient Greeks understood this double nature of happiness. They had two distinct concepts:

  • Hedonia: experiencing pleasure and feeling good (a fleeting state).

  • Eudaimonia: living a life full of meaning, virtue, and excellence; achieving personally important goals and realizing one’s potential (a long-term journey).

Flourishing involves cultivating both of these. It is differentiated from languishing, the state in which one feels bored, “off”, and floundering. To languish is to move like a zombie through both the present and into the future.

Happiness has this dual nature. But so many of our common metaphors for happiness don’t at all capture it.

For example, the saying “good vibes only”: is that “good vibes” just in the present, or can one feel annoyed/angered/sad/disappointed (aka decidedly negative) about present circumstances, while still retaining a long-range optimism and positive outlook for the long-term?

Or consider the phrase “to be on cloud nine”. Interestingly, the etymology of this metaphor is disputed. Some say it comes from the International Cloud Atlas or US Weather Bureau which categorized clouds on a numerical system, with 9 being the highest, fluffiest cumulonimbus clouds. This would suggest that happiness is as transient as changes in weather. However, other etymologists believe that “cloud nine” refers to a stage in Buddhism that represents a path to enlightenment. This would just converge more with the long-range, deeper focus of eudaimonia.

Happiness up and down and in and out

As the foregoing suggests, there is a deeper reason why happiness is so hard to pin down. It has to do with the fact that as human beings we are emotionally complex—often we can be experiencing multiple emotions at different levels, though here again our metaphors just seem to add to the difficulties.

One of the most profound experiences of my childhood that has forever shaped the way I understand happiness occurred when one of my great-uncles suddenly passed away from a heart attack. My great-aunt (his wife) was clearly struck by the tragedy. But during the memorial services, she was the one most full of a deep happy celebration of his life. She kept telling everyone, “We always danced through life.”

My great-aunt taught me that even in moments of intense, life-altering sadness and grief, there can still be a deep inner gratitude, grace, and happiness for the good in life.

I started to come to think of this through metaphor as a deep inner golden core. It’s like a ball of goodness and joy deep inside that no pain could ever touch. Not even the pain of death could erase the fact that a happy marriage had been created and sustained for a lifetime. Even amongst all the sadness and destruction, that golden core inside remained pure, intact.

Years later, I read what became a favorite novel, The Fountainhead, in which the protagonist, an architect who built a temple to the human spirit only to have it destroyed by his enemies, expressed a similar emotional experience:

“I don’t believe it matters to me—that they’re going to destroy it. Maybe it hurts so much that I don’t even know I’m hurt. But I don’t think so. If you want to carry it for my sake, don’t carry more than I do. I’m not capable of suffering completely. I never have. It goes only down to a certain point and then it stops. As long as there is that untouched point, it’s not really pain. You mustn’t look like that.”
“Where does it stop?”
“Where I can think of nothing and feel nothing except that I designed that temple. I built it. Nothing else can seem very important.”
“You shouldn’t have built it. You shouldn’t have delivered it to the sort of thing they’re doing.”
“That doesn’t matter. Not even that they’ll destroy it. Only that it had existed.”

Interestingly, here the metaphor for this kind of profound happiness and satisfaction is not deep inside, but deep down, a metaphor suggesting bedrock and foundations, perhaps most perfectly appropriate for a character who’s an architect.

However, not even deep is always the metaphor used to capture this kind of grand happiness stemming from excellence in living. Sometimes people speak of the perspective of your higher self, an up-above metaphor, that which raises your experience to a higher plane.

So, I’m not sure if this eudaimonia happiness is in, down, up or where—but I do believe that whatever metaphors we find to try to express this experience we ought to try to communicate about it more. Because maybe the more we try to express how this kind of complex emotion is possible, maybe the more it will help us all to get more of it.