Have you observed how much crated we are in pre-determined models? There are molds for everything. Choose yours, withdraw it from the grocery shelf, go to the cashier and pay. Now, you have happiness (because of course you buy it).

It’s true that an economical transaction is part of happiness. But if money is necessary, it’s certainly not enough. Besides money one needs some psychological and social conditions. We like to be with certain people and to feel good with them. But it’s not sufficient having them close by for happiness magically pop up and mainly to last. Health, for sure, is another important ingredient, however it’s not enough to be happy. In the absence of any of these dimensions, we imagine that having what is missing will bring happiness. Error.

Obtaining what we need propitiates the conditions for happiness, but it doesn’t grant it. Anybody ends up finding this out, sooner or later. The conditions open the way, the next step is “getting there”.

Animals in the zoo are not happy. Slow in their movements, still or agitated, eyes subdued, passive expression: these are the signs of depression. A lion in a cage cannot be happy, a bear between walls of cement in an artificial space will never feel joy of being alive, as well as a bee impeded to make honey, an eagle hindered to fly high and a crocodile forced to stay on dry sand. They are not happy because they are prevented to follow their nature. They live in condition that violate what they are, repressing their essential needs. They receive food and shelter: so what? It’s evident that it’s not sufficient for animals to be happy, what we shall say about humans.

A child locked at home will become depressed because children need to move and explore the territory in order to know it and know themselves. I recall the case of a few-old-month baby who always cried. The mother was a young woman, uneducated and poor. Her neighbor had noticed that the baby stopped crying during the only daily stroll his mother took with him. The rest of the time the newborn used to spend it in a small room, in his crib and without much diversion but himself…

A few months old human being instinctively refuses a limited, uninteresting and isolated life. Even so young and dependent, a baby is intolerant to immobility and to the absence of visual, hearing, emotional, tactile and cognitive learning.

This development in the sense of apprehension of the world and self- discovery and expansion is happiness. Money, culture, information, company are wonderful tools to promote this growing, but the core of happiness lays in the interchange between experience and knowledge that leads to more sophisticated experience and knowledge and so on, which are at the root of the process of the evolution of the conscience.

The human essence lays in its consciousness, in everything else animals are superior to us. Only knowledge and experience lighten up the sparkle of awareness.

What kind of experience and knowledge each person needs in order to express his or her human essence, this is up to the individual, it‘s the sole subjective part to which any one has the right to have his or her own space. We all  parts of the same humanity, having the identical root and the equal human vocation. We differentiate from one another because of our peculiarities, choices, qualities, idiosyncrasy and foolery.

We are different flowers from the same garden. The goal is flourishing, which is happiness. On what each one will flourish is the surprise. But what does it matter being an oak or a pine? An apple tree or a mango tree? A rose or a tulip?

Everything is good. The question is not to get stuck with the idea that only by being a rose we will be happy, for in the case we carry inside the seed of a sunflower sad will be our destiny. Thus, happiness is 1) getting rid of stereotypes in order to 2) be free to make whatever seed we nurture in legitimately flourish in joy – guarded by the daring conscious person who take charge of his or her life.