Hi Everybody,
Hope all is well with you. We're in the middle of the chapter on Buddhism and happiness and we've reached the point where I'm suggesting that perhaps well-being is perhaps a more accurate term to describe what we're talking about. Why? Because in the modern idiom it clearly expresses a much broader and deeper and mnore solidly based emotion. On one recent occasion for example when I was talking to an audience of mainly businessmen about Buddhist values, the phrase,' happiness in the workplace got a noticeably cool and somewhat cynical reception. But as soon as I switched to well-being in the work place there was an immediate understanding of what I was talking about, a much more substantial, an altogether more stable and focused state of life, than laughter and good cheer.
And once again that distinction finds support among the scientists. As Daniel Goleman explains in some detail in his book Working with Emotional Intelligence, when comparisons are made between the effectiveness or productivity of people at work, the difference is very often found to lie not so much in the know-how or the npurely technical skills of different people, but much more broadly in their overall sense of well-being and therefore their greater capacity for handling relationships or dealing in a calm and measured way with difficulties that arise.
But perhaps more important of all, this phrase well-being has so much greater depth and breadth and capacity that it can even embrace the idea of misfortune and challenge. Buddhism for example, when it speaks of happiness, has in mind a solid, lasting, resilient sense of well-being at the core of one's life, that can endure and be experienced even in the midst of sadness and and loss and crucial challenge. That again finds multiple echoes in the work of modern sociologists, who talk about the need to get real! They argue that optimism and happiness cannot be about being eternally cheerful. That would be hopelessly unreal. It has to be about getting up close to, and embracing the pains and problems we encounter so that we truly understand them and learn how to work through them to a better place.
They talk about the immense value that we can generate in our lives by learning to look for the seeds of the positive in things that go wrong in our lives, rather than continually being eaten up by the sense of loss or damage.
Nuff said for one episode.
Look forward to seeing you again next time.
Best wishes,
William
The Case for Buddhism is available on Amazon and as a download on Kindle.
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