Peter RuddFiled under: Uncategorized | Tags: chance, fortune, hap, happiness, luck, Matthew Abbott, The Figure of the World
A crowd dances in artificial rain in Hyderabad, Photograph: Mahesh Kumar A/AP
Receive what is happening right now, without extra layers of design or intent, knowing that to exist is gratuitous. In the moment, without complication, and most of all, aware of life’s happenstance and mystery.
What it means to be happy:
The etymological root of the English ‘happiness’ is the Middle English ‘hap’, which means luck, fortune or chance[…] [A] happy mode of being is one in which I am able to receive the fact of the world – its happening – in the right way: the happy are those who live this fact as something lucky or fortuitous, as something that could have been otherwise, but (happily) was not.
‘Hap’ can also mean ‘absence of design or intent in relation to a particular event’: what haps does so for no reason; it is literally graceful. The happiness in question is the happiness of living the fact that existence is unnecessary or gratuitous: not (empirical) happiness at the occurrence of this or that thing, but (transcendental) happiness at their happening.
From Matthew Abbott’s The Figure of This World
from Spurious by Lars Iyer
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