'The Angels Knocking on the Tavern Door'

Indigenous Transience, a photo by Kalyne Link on Flickr.


'Don't allow your inward being to be hurt by what
You have or have not. Be glad, because every 
Perfect thing is on its way to nonexistence.'

from The Guesthouse With Two Doors

The Angels Knocking on the Tavern Door: Thirty Poems of Hafez
Translated by Rober Bly and Leonard Lewisohn
2008
Harper, NY
p. 59

'I am the happiest man alive ...'

Resilience, a photo by neekoh.fi on Flickr.

'I am the happiest man alive. I have that in me that can convert poverty to riches, adversity to prosperity, and I am more invulnerabale than Achilles: fortune hath not one place to hit me. '

Sir Thomas Browne 1642 Religio Medici
 

Dan Gilbert: The surprising science of happiness

delight, a photo by mayeesherr. (in Sri Lanka!) on Flickr.

Dan Gilbert, author of "Stumbling on Happiness," challenges the idea that we’ll be miserable if we don’t get what we want. Our "psychological immune system" lets us feel truly happy even when things don’t go as planned.

Harvard psychologist Dan Gilbert says our beliefs about what will make us happy are often wrong -- a premise he supports with intriguing research, and explains in his accessible and unexpectedly funny book, Stumbling on Happiness.

 
Natural happiness is what we get when we get what we wanted, and synthetic happiness is what we make when we don’t get what we wanted. In our society, we have a strong belief that synthetic happiness is of an inferior kind.

http://www.ted.com/speakers/dan_gilbert.html