“In most men, what is at peace is numbed and what is active is raging madly.”

~Epicurus, Vatican Sayings #11

I have a soft spot for Epicurus.  Many reasons could be listed, but the most important one is his sense of reasonableness that is sorely lacking in many other philosophers of his era.

The Stoics talked about building a wall that hermetically sealed off the self from the outside world.  The Buddha sketched out a system in which the self is negated and all desire is seen as the cause of suffering and hence in need of eradication.  And the list goes on.

In essence, the answer to the age old question of ‘how to be happy’ that many philosophers give seems to be that we must eradicate all desire.  Either  you squash down inside you all of the things that make you unhappy or you lose yourself in them and end up going mad.  This dichotomy convinces those of us who want to be happy that in order to do so we have to cut off all the things that have traditionally been identified with being human.

But are these the only two alternatives?

What Epicurus seemed to indicate, as did the Taoists before him, is that there’s a third way.  This third way, at least for Epicurus, was one of learning to identify the truly important things, jettison the rest, and hence  be happy.  It’s great to have good food, drink and such, but what’s really necessary to be happy?  For the Epicureans, no pleasure was off-limits and unhappiness wasn’t the result of having desires per se.  Unhappiness was the result of not truly understanding what needs/desires were natural and essential, resulting in chasing after things that really had no true bearing on being content in this life.

There’s merit to this approach.  At the end of the day, having the latest iPhone, iPad or other iThing has absolutely no real bearing on whether or not you’re happy.  In fact, inecessantly chasing after these things can cause a whole lot of unhappiness, seeing as you have to part with a lot of money to obtain them, work to get that money in the first place, and so on.  But, having a place to live, basic food to eat, and real, deep relationships with others are certainly things worth desiring.  The problem isn’t desire, you see, but rather desiring the wrong things and then pinning our happiness to those wrong things.

So many of us have exactly what we need to be happy.  We have a roof over our heads, food in our stomachs, transportation, clothes, and loved ones.  We CHOOSE to be unhappy because we’re constantly striving for things outside our reach and irrelevant to being truly content.  It’s always the next gadget or whatchamacallit that’s going to satisfy us.  But when we get that next brass ring, we find it to tarnish all too quickly.

Are the only two options to either be numb or mad?  I think not.  Let’s consider the third path of living simply, enjoying what we have, embracing our friends and family, and resting in the beauty of our beautiful world.