Happiness is Freedom from Fear
Most people have a certain definition of happiness. These definitions can range from the poetic to the dry, and some are optimistic while others are pessimistic. I am guessing that each is crafted in an attempt to address the author’s current struggles or to relate happiness with a value or thing that fulfills a need they lack like love, family, independence, or freedom.
The definition that stuck with me, however, and the one that I kept going back to over and over is the following:
Happiness is Freedom from Fear
I remember being surprised when I heard this definition because it felt so true, so universal, and so encompassing.
Most people fear many different things...we fear illness, we fear death, we fear poverty, we fear the loss of reputation, we fear being viewed as awkward or stupid, we fear losing our money, perhaps we fear the ideas and people surrounding our children, we fear war, we fear falling planes, and we fear hell.
Freedom from fear is what we desire. It's a mother's hug that comforts the crying child, it's effortlessly falling asleep, it's the lover's morning kiss under the warm blanket, it's the pigeons that declare their ownership of the sky when the white flag marks the end of the war.
Freedom of fear is heaven -the place where there are neither snakes to fear nor the loss of a child.
Happiness is the Freedom from Fear.
I would like to note the following:
I started finding differences -even contradictions- in my definitions and priorities since I started writing. Of course, our ideas change and develop as we go through new and different life experiences, and I can now more easily see the changes and compare my current ideas to my previous self since I have them written down, which helps me understand how certain events influenced my character and thoughts.
"To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men,—that is genius. Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense; for the inmost in due time becomes the outmost [...]. Speak what you think now in hard words and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day." - Ralph W. Emerson
Laith Alayassa, Nov, 2022
