“Happiness is not a matter of intensity but balance, order, rhythm, and harmony.” – Thomas Merton.

George Orwell writes that many people get a good amount of fun and joy from life, “but on balance, and being honest, life is marked by suffering, and only the very young or the very foolish imagine otherwise.”

I suppose that I come down somewhere in the middle of these two brilliant minds.

Pain is inevitable in life, but suffering is a choice. For some years now, I have been working to bring balance to my life, and Merton’s idea of happiness is closer to mine than Orwell’s.

Suffering is woven into human biology and experience.

We all suffer, and we will all die. Acceptance of that is, to me, a cornerstone in my own spiritual life.

I am shocked and saddened to learn that most people are stunned by suffering and death and deny its existence for as long as possible. They consider the subject depressing.

To me, balance is the key to happiness, at least in one way; it means we can see and accept the true nature of life and still find happiness and joy.

When I began to find balance in my life, work became an entirely different experience.

There is a passion that moves you to a whole new level of fulfillment and gratitude, and that’s when I began to feel my best for myself and others.

I thought hard about what it means to have balance in my life.

Here’s where I landed: Balanced living means achieving good health in all aspects of my life, mind, and body. I work constantly now on both: relationships, work, health, and emotional happiness.

This has to do with love. I must have love in my life – for people, animals, and Mother Earth.

I also thought about what Merton means by “intensity.”  

In so many ways, the quality of intensity is the opposite of the qualities of spirituality. Passion demands extreme degrees of strength, force, energy, or feeling. Balance – spirituality – calls for reflection, silence, and truth.

I got so caught up in work, family responsibilities and problems – money, and security – that I forgot to take time and learn how to live.

I needed to know just who I was and what I wanted.

It seems obvious now, but I know very few people who even attempted it.

Our world is one of greed, distraction, and intolerance. I always rushed from here to there without knowing where I was going.

Living differently requires meditation, thought, solitude, and much hard work. I was rushing and stumbling through life.

All I knew was that something was wrong; I was hollow, frightened, and torn.

So I went up to the top of a mountain, bought a cabin, and spent a year there with two dogs. That began the trek towards happiness and balance.

Without that year on the mountain, I would probably be dead by now.

I had to bring order to my life; I went to get the help I needed. I had to face the truth about me and change. I had to stop running around like a madman, calling it a success.

I lived in a cloud of chaos and confusion.

Then, rhythm, I call it life rhythm, it’s complex.

One philosopher I read described this as a shared sense of familiarity with the motion of our days that can help us achieve peace and accomplish more as we move throughout life.

It meant connecting with myself and establishing meaningful, nourishing, creative, and personal routines.

For me, it also meant silence, meditation, and facing and accepting the truth. It meant casting aside the way we are taught to live and defining my own life without labels.

And harmony, last but not least.

Psychologists and spiritualists tend to define peace in the same way.

In spiritual terms, the consensus calls for a love of one’s notion of God or, more generally, for a positive or nourishing state of inner peace, calmness, balance, the feeling of being tuned into or with the world and the people around you.

For me, it meant doing good. It meant learning to work with people I understood and listened to. It meant working to be a better human being.

The social sciences describe harmony as a consistent pattern of relationships within a social group and between individuals.

In a spiritual context, it means learning to listen, something few of us are good at, especially me.

For the religious, listening means listening to God.

For people who are spiritual but not religious (people like me), it means learning to listen, period. They call us “seekers”; we believe balance and true spirituality are impossible without listening.

“Until I learn to listen, to the scriptures, to those around me,” wrote Joan Chittister in her book  Radical Spirit, ” to my underlying life messages, to the wisdom of those who have already maneuvered successfully around the dangers of a life that is both unmotivated and meaningful – I will have nothing to say about life myself.”

Fortunately, Chittister went on to say a lot about life, and I am grateful to her for that.

I am a storyteller, and I have a passion for hearing other people’s stories.

To me, a life of balance is the path to happiness. It doesn’t mean the absence f pain.

I am a human like everybody else, and we will all suffer together.

That will always unite us, even if we can’t bear to accept it. None of us will live forever. In my mind, that makes every person on earth a brother and sister.

It means that pain and sorrow are a part of my life, balanced by other parts – joy, love, harmony, work, and my rhythm of life.