Health and Happiness—Can They Be Yours?
AS LONG AS there have been imperfect men and women, they have longed for health and happiness. Though these are surely two of the most important human desires, they have proved elusive.
Men have given much thought to, and offered much counsel on, this search. Observed Dr. Dennis Jaffe: “Today, the key to enduring health and healing often lies in your own behavior.” Abraham Lincoln once commented: “People are about as happy as they make up their mind to be.” Do you agree? How keenly do you desire happiness? How much does achieving it depend on having good health?
People have looked everywhere for happiness, following seemingly endless leads. They have investigated philosophy, psychology, and metaphysics. In their search for happiness, some have explored science, the arts, and music. Yet there is little doubt that a major part of true happiness is related to having good health. “If you’ve got your health, you’ve got just about everything,” said a popular television commercial.
Pursuing this avenue, many people have explored a variety of health theories, both orthodox and unorthodox. Nearly every public library shows the endless possibilities of diet regimens and forms of treatment. “Many books have been written on health, starting in antiquity,” commented the noted heart specialist Dr. Paul Dudley White. “One of the best was Regiment of Helthe written about a thousand years ago.”
Despite all of this, the search for health and happiness has been a disappointing one for the majority of humans. Does this surprise you, considering how advanced our civilization has supposedly become? Clearly, science has not done away with sickness, aging, and death.
But would it further surprise you to know that we still have no way to measure happiness and no good definition of what it is? In a lecture considering “Reflections on Happiness,” Pierre Teilhard de Chardin concluded: “For centuries this has been the subject of endless books, investigations, individual and collective experiments, one after another; and, sad to relate, there has been complete failure to reach unanimity. For many of us, in the end, the only practical conclusion to be drawn from the whole discussion is that it is useless to continue the search.”
Is that how you feel about happiness? Ask yourself some personal but honest questions. Are you truly happy now? Or is real happiness to be found only in heaven? Is there any sure prospect that we can have health and happiness, and even have these right here on earth?