Happiness. Temperance. Memory.

Happiness. Temperance. Memory.

Happiness. Temperance. Memory. Three words. The motto of Aqua Gutta, a blog in the universe, is made of three simple words. Simple words to trigger the machinery behind our whole thinking, a thinking that could only stroll in the conditional. Every human being should strive for happiness. This happiness should only be possible by using temperance, the guarantor of the balance that characterizes it. And such temperance should itself be built understanding our world, and keeping this very understanding in our memory. Walking back the path: the more we would understand, the better we would balance ourselves, and the easiest we would find happiness. Neat!

Reaching happiness, the ideal balance.

Happiness as a goal to achieve, for everyone. Ok. But actually, why? Why should we aim at living a happy life and nurturing happiness? This might appear obvious and if so, that is great, but happiness is good. Some would say, happiness is the highest good. So go for it. It is easy to understand, happiness does not hurt, happiness does not harm. Only good feelings, only proper well-being. In a state of happiness, we feel peaceful, accomplished. We are perfectly balanced.

And that is more than enough for a lifetime. We would probably be wrong not to embrace the quest for happiness, or even more, not to cultivate it. We would be right to put these goals above everything else, by design. The ultimate target now roughly identified, how to (try to) lock it in order to hit it?

Because we have not been specific here. What happiness is it exactly? Whose happiness? Ours? Yours? The global happiness? By the way, is the happiness of someone always congruent with the happiness of someone else? And then who states that a given happiness is a true happiness? That being asked, we could make a decent assertion, that is happiness lies at the individual level. After all, if all human beings were sincerely happy, all our problems would be solved, wouldn’t they? The question of whether or not this is going to happen one day is left to the (very) distant future, the only possible witness.

Therefore, everyone should strive for happiness. But how?

Wielding temperance, the guardian of balance.

We mean it. Happiness is the perfect balance. Everything starts off well and continues smoothly. It is neither too much, nor too little. It is just right. And what characterizes rightness here is temperance. Temperance because, obviously, it is bad when good is in excess or when there is a lack of good. It is bad because it is too much, or not enough. And too much or not enough is not right.

As an example, take sports. This might seem obvious but will resonate. Sports and physical fitness are most certainly good for our health. And being healthy, without any illness, or at least without a too much debilitating illness, is probably helping when someone wants to reach happiness. However, when our sport practices turn into excess, injuries are not far. And injuries hurt, they are not good. We are probably moving backwards from happiness here.

Thus, one should moderate their practice of sport according to their abilities to benefit from it. We could always improve our athletic abilities without injuring ourselves - some professional athletes demonstrate this - but it would always be moderation that would achieve just, balanced practice. And without this balance, there is no well-being, no happiness. What would be true here for health and sports could be true for any areas, whatever their complexity.

Therefore, to keep balance and strive for happiness, everyone should somehow implement temperance. Let us be specific here, how to know what to do?

Cultivating comprehension, the foundation of temperance.

Once accepted the fact that a moderate behavior would balance our being and open the way to happiness, how are we supposed to know what to do? What would be the steps to follow? Well, perhaps we could know what to do by learning it beforehand. So all the learning we accumulate could be gathered in an ongoing global understanding, thus giving the key to rightness.

To put it another way, we would start by learning one thing, then a second, and a few more. And we would then understand them, we would make them interact in a common whole, namely our understanding of the world. We would then be able to use this understanding, steadily increased by new elements, to systematically adjust and readjust ourselves in order to achieve our ultimate objective, happiness.

Learn, understand, know it and then remember: it is by keeping in mind the updated understanding from our learning that we give ourselves powerful means of acting with temperance.

Only one question would remain: how to learn in the first place?

And this is the ambition of Aqua Gutta, a blog in the universe: offering a way to learn, one path among others, by trying to modestly explain some of the things of this world, in a necessarily eclectic and fragmented way, flawed and reductive, but always with caring and truthfulness. Because this drop of water we make available to you, and the others you may find elsewhere, may one day be aggregated and form a great and beautiful riverbed.