My Blooming Life

Many intelligent people still equate happiness with fun. The truth is that fun and happiness have little or nothing in common. Fun is what  we experience during an act. Happiness is what we experience after an act. It is a deeper, more abiding emotion.

Going to an amusement park or ball game, watching a movie or television, are fun activities that help us relax, temporarily forget our problems and maybe even laugh. But they do not bring happiness, because their positive effects end when the fun ends.

The way people cling to the belief that a fun-filled, pain-free life equals happiness actually diminishes their chances of ever attaining real happiness. If fun and pleasure are equated with happiness, then pain must be equated with unhappiness. But, in fact, the opposite is true: More times than not, things that lead to happiness involve some pain.

As a result, many people avoid the very endeavors that are the source of true happiness. They fear the pain inevitably brought by such things as marriage, raising children, professional achievement, religious commitment, civic or charitable work, self-improvement.

Couples who choose not have children are deciding in favor of painless fun over painful happiness. They can dine out whenever they want, travel wherever they want and sleep as late as they want. Couples with infant children are lucky to get a whole night's sleep or a three-day vacation. I don't know any parent who would choose the word fun to describe raising children.

But couples who decide not to have children never experience the pleasure of hugging them or tucking them into bed at night. They never know the joys of watching a child grow up of playing with a grandchild.

Understanding and accepting that true happiness has nothing to do with fun is one of the most liberating realizations we can ever come to. It liberates time: now we can devote more hours to activities that can genuinely increase our happiness. It liberates money: buying that new car or those fancy clothes that will do nothing to increase our happiness now seems pointless. And it liberates us from envy: we now understand that all those rich and glamorous people we were so sure are happy because they are always having so much fun actually may not be happy at all.

The moment we understand that fun does not bring happiness, we begin to lead our lives differently. The effect can be, quite literally, life-transforming.

Rencently I've been busy at decorating my new apartment. From April of this year, every weekend was devoted to this work which made me more tired than during workday.

Fortunately, now the work is closing to the end. And I'm supposed to move into it in the middle of July. I'm so happy for this.

I've been to a beautiful place, Dali, which is a small and silent town in Yunnan Province of China. Actually there are many foreigners love it and live there.

It's a place where you can just stay, without anything in your mind, to enjoy the clouds and mountains around you all the time. Right then you are indeed stay with yourself and no others.

What a pity I don't know how to insert a image, or I'll share those amazing pictures with you guys.