Giusto Gervasutti once wrote about how to be really happy:
We stopped on a large rock terrace, about twenty yards from the dome of ice that forms the summit, and stretched ourselves out in the sun. It was hot, and we badly wanted to sleep. We felt no shiver of joy, no ecstasy in victory. We had reached our objective, and already it lay behind us. A dream had become reality - and I felt something close to bitterness. How much finer it would be, I couldn’t help thinking, to long for something all one’s life, to fight for it without respite, and never to achieve it!
But this was only another episode. Down in the valley again I should at once look round for some other goal, and if it didn’t exist, I would create it! I do not know why people associate a man’s happiness with the satisfaction of all his desires - a kind of eternal beatitude, which could just as well be a state of complete apathy. The completely happy man would have nothing left to say, nothing left to do. For myself I prefer an unattainable happiness, always near, always elusive: the prize which vanishes every time one grasps it, to give way to another, still harder, still more distant. The moments when the heart really overflows with happiness come when the sense of life is heightened by tension and struggle - the actual moments of conquest, or more often of defeat, and not the dead moments when victory has been achieved. (Quoted from The Life of the Creative Spirit, p. 187.)
Are moments like these the only ones when the heart really overflows with happiness? Or course not, but still. . . .
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For a bit about Giusto Gervasutti, click here.
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