Writing about happiness in times like this is like in the song on “try sleeping with a broken heart” (‘Brussels attack’). Knowing that we are facing challenging times around the world, does not make us happy, but knowing and choosing to stay calm and kind to each other, might help.
The core question of this trilogy-posts is: How to find the bliss point between happiness and knowledge? Namely, how is it to constantly learn new things (and leaving your comfort zone) & stay happy at the same time? A related good question is how to cope when you learned about something bad/terrible and further choose to stay happy afterwards? To cover these questions, I decided to write a tetralogy instead of stopping at the 3rd post , meanwhile…
My (humble) conclusion is that knowledge and happiness are 2 separate potions that can be taken separately if you want them to work at its best OR these can be taken together, with care.
In Research, both knowledge & happiness are two distinct areas. Knowledge here usually goes together with innovation and is seen, as the Australian government explains, as inseparable fields that both drive economies around the world. Innovation is the application of or transmission of knowledge down a pipeline from research to development to application (…). Happiness Research defines it as personal well-being and satisfaction with life, measured mostly by opinion polls. Ok, good to know, but..mm, what do we do with everything we know when it comes to happiness that we do not report to statistics offices?
If you ask yoga people who are busy with the knowledge of innerself, the knowledge does not come rather from your brain/mind, but from your heart that will indicate how well you know yourself. They will tell you to breath more from your belly rather then from your chest and that we are living in a world that thinks more from their heads rather then from their heart & this makes us unhappy, because happiness is usually associated to be coming from our heart and not from our head.
It’s like in a relationship, you know when you are happy with someone, because you feel it and you do not question whether you should further be with that person or not, you just are.
You are happy & you know it! 🙂
You know it & you are happy (?)…
(to be continued..)
With love for Research, Researchista
Photo-thanks(es): Peter Mullenberg, Ms. Paola June Brune.