The Happiness of Mindfulness

Have you ever experienced the delightful moments when you travel to foreign countries, not only you can indulge yourself with spectacular sceneries and exotic cuisines, but also have the opportunity to savor the local brand of happiness wherever you go? Such endlessly fascinating experiences are just the juicy contents delivered by the book, The Geography of Bliss, from an eminent journalist Eric Weiner. By detailing his traveling around the world to the countries where people are considered highly contented as well as the ones discontented, Weiner shows readers with some incredibly intrigued facts of the happiness among the people in different countries. With his sharp journalist’s eye and personal charm …show more content…
In reality, negative emotional experiences are unavoidable and universal. You bump into them because either some extreme events overwhelming you or your emotions sometimes are too fragile to withstand the adversity. If you allow the negative emotions run their courses, your lives would definitely be turned into a miserable state, needless to say happiness. For instance, recently the envy pandemic has been leading people in Moldova to the land awash in unhappiness, as observed by Weiner, “Envy, that enemy of happiness, is rife in Moldova. It’s an especially virulent strain, one devoid of the driving ambition that usually accompanies envy. So the Moldovans get all of the downsides of envy without any of its benefits—namely, the thriving businesses and towering buildings erected by ambitious men and women out to prove they are better than everyone else. Moldovans derive more pleasure from their neighbor’s failure than their own success” (Weiner 203). On the contrary, the envy has been well suppressed in Switzerland and increasingly become an endangered species because of the Swiss’ mentality of moderation. In fact, the happy Swiss have long ago realized that moderation, preached acutely by the mindfulness devotees, holds the key to subdue the human envy and achieve happiness in …show more content…
They articulate that mindfulness could provide people with a viable way to achieve happiness, but when it does, the happiness is largely reflected on people’s mental wellbeing. However, physical happiness, in terms of sensual pleasure and attachment to material possession, is seemingly out of the picture. No matter how fleeting the effects of sensual pleasure are, the earthly knowledge is that sensual pleasure is still the fundamental part of human happiness. Irrespective of mindfulness, the awful reality that, in general, people living in the richer countries tend to feel happier than the people from the poorer nations does help us keep a more reasonable perspective, and without the strong human desires for sensual pleasure and material possession, human civilization might have been sinfully undeveloped and rudimentary. Denying that reality is equivalent to serious obliviousness, which is somewhat ironic to mindfulness. Maybe, mental happiness and physical happiness are not mutually exclusive, but rather supplementary. And maybe, the permissive Thais have really found a sublime recipe for making their country an oasis of happiness by mixing the self-indulgence with mindfulness as “The Thais… are too busy being happy to think of about happiness” (Weiner 225)? Impartially speaking, you should not make yourselves becoming the victim of the idea that it is sinful to