Inevitable Happiness

I'll tell you why you should be happy: Because there is no hope.

What problem would be worth devoting yourself to if there is no solution? Why would you sacrifice your life knowing every ideal is lost? What greater happiness than accepting the determinism of the universe?

So I'll keep telling you: You are condemned.

The sun will rise every morning and set every evening. And you will never hide the sun at noon or bring it out at night. And the mountain will never move an inch however hard you push it, nor will you change one speck of this merciless world that has set out to provoke you, down to your guts, into wanting to change it.

You will have to get up every morning and push the rock up the hillside, so that it inevitably rolls back down and you have to start again. Every breath you take in you will have to let out and, even if you don't want to, you will have to breathe in again. So says the law: you must sow what you want to reap, and reap so you can sow again. In the same way, whatever you push up will come down, and whatever comes down you will have to push up again.

Your mind will be a space for every kind of thought and emotion, and you will be able to do nothing to prevent it. Your body will return to the earth that will feed new bodies, mortal too. As surely as you will die, you will be twice as sure to be reborn. And so your wheel will turn, and on each round its centrifugal force will push you outward so that you come back to your center. The spiral will rise, and everything will fall back down again.

This I tell you: You are condemned to exist.

Then, with no hope of achieving anything, you can relax, because nothing you do will make anything better. You can finally enjoy your life, because none of your struggles will get the result they crave. You can stop defending that you are someone, because any identity you cling to will fail spectacularly. You can breathe, because it is natural to.

And I also tell you: You are condemned to transcend.

The wheel of learning will pass through dark places and come back to the light, and suffering will drag you along until you want, with all your will, to return to peace. The mango will inevitably ripen, and from its seed the tree will flower up to the sky. You will be able to do nothing to keep from growing, nor stop the understanding of your consciousness from unfolding its splendor.

And when you come back to yourself and the world recognizes the glory of your being, you will finally see that, even when you felt the determinism of the world in your own flesh, you were always free.

What happiness: There is no hope.