Heroes Not Zombies

In “Deux Idées de Bonheur”, Luis Sepúlveda says that he’s come to understand that happiness and wellbeing are a web or network of relationships, between ourselves and others, between ourselves and what is around us, between ourselves and Nature.

I like that. It seems very true to me. We all exist with an intricate and infinite web of connections. None of us exist without any relationships. We all have, or have had parents, we’ve all encountered many, many others over the course of our lives, people we’ve been taught by, looked after by, friends, rivals, people we are related to through genes and marriages. We all live our every day lives in a web of others who produce, transport, prepare and sell the food we eat. Others who make the clothes we wear, who make every object we handle in an ordinary day. We live with others with whom we share our stories, co-create our values, our purposes, our reasons to get up every morning.

And we are in an intimate and unceasing relationship of exchange of energy, information and substances with the natural environment. The air, the water, the soil, the way we work the land, change the landscapes, warm the atmosphere around the Earth.

The other dimension of these vast webs is time. Our lives are all like stories….we are continually describing and telling the present as it emerges from our personal and our shared past, and which, moment by moment, is already in the process of becoming the future.

Happiness and wellbeing are not states, not independent, self-sustaining, isolated characteristics or “data points” to be measured. They are experiences which emerge out of a web of moments, within a network of connected people and events.

They are qualities of life, not permanently present, but always in the process of creation, like an intricate cloth of threads woven across lifetimes.