Tag: joy

  • Pleasure

    Pleasure

    For a long time I tried to understand the difference between existing and living.

    We can all be placed inside the expression “the flight from pain and the chase after pleasure”…, and that expression defines the comfort zone, which, once we have it, becomes the most precious aspect of our life…, and the more wonderful it is, the more precious it becomes…

    Only that, as we keep it and use it…, we become more and more unsatisfied, more anxious…

    The search for pleasure… has as its reference the first time you tasted it…, in fact we long for the substances released in the brain, but we remain at the first level of obtaining them.

    The problem is that we try to find pleasure on the same road on which we met it…, and we do not realize that we need more of it, or more often, only to admit that we still do not perceive it as at our first tastings…, few go past the way in which they look for pleasure…, they do not realize that the first methods were suited to that period of existence and of awareness, and that afterwards the model has to be refined, the way of obtaining them.

    I arrived here trying to relive the joy that had been given to me, at various moments, and I found that the sensation had spoiled. In the meantime I had had others of greater intensity (or of greater weight), and going then to those I found that they too are at least slightly spoiled, what I perceive from memories no longer brings the same lived feeling…

    And then the joys I brought to others “struck me”…, their state of emotion, which produced my joy…, that one was almost as intense…, I cannot say that it does not lose intensity, but not in the same measure as my own joys, and in any case they are far more alive than my own joys, made by me or by others…

    On the other hand…, fears…, with me they stay as intense as the first time they came…, so what is fine loses its intensity, what is bad holds…, thinking about how I deal with this…, I found the reference of making small, unexpected joys for those around me…, that keeps me, in memories too, with plenty of satisfactions and joy…


    I am not trying to convince you. But if you have a measure of your own, I would like to hear it…

  • I realized that I am Grateful

    I realized that I am Grateful

    The other day I was driving through the county…, I went to visit a cave…, and then I went on to see some other places…

    Very many monasteries, and very many people at the monasteries, clusters of parked cars…, and I was wondering…, why do people go and stand in clusters at the gates, why do they go there…? Monastic life has a form “torn from the world”, but people do not go there wholly, to leave the world…, they bring it with them. They go on the principle that those monks are “cleaner”, and that their prayer carries more “weight” before God…, and they go because they need “something”…, they pay for a pomelnic or two — a list of names handed over to be prayed for…

    Having this thought and driving on, I pictured how people arrive at the monastery, and I am watching as the monk who greets them asks them “With what problem?”, and the people answer “with a health problem…”, “with a problem with money…”, “with a problem with the neighbour…”, and in the string of my thoughts the monk turns towards me and asks me “And you, with what problem?”

    I caught myself having no answer…, in my mind I fell silent, mute, at that turn of thought…, then I realized… “I have come to give thanks, I am GRATEFUL for my life!”

    This thought lit up my day…, so that you understand: I do not have a perfect life, I do not have a family, I do not have many of the things that are considered “needs”, I am divorced, I have no partner…, but I am glad of life and grateful for everything I have lived, for my whole road…


    I am not trying to convince you. But if you have a measure of your own, I would like to hear it…