If we are to be happy, we must first react against our tendency to follow the line of least resistance, a tendency that causes us either to remain as we are, or to look primarily to activities external to ourselves for what will provide new impetus to our lives. We must, it is true, sink our roots deep into the rich, tangible, material realities which surround us; but in the end it is by working to achieve our own inner perfection intellectual, artistic, moral that we shall find happiness. The most important thing in life, Nansen used to say, is to find oneself. Through and beyond matter, spirit is hard at work, building. Centration.
If we are to be happy we must, second, react against the selfishness that causes us either to close in on ourselves, or to force our domination upon others. There is a way of loving a bad and sterile way by which we try to possess rather than to give ourselves. Here again, in the case of the couple or the group, we meet that same law of maximum effort which governed the progress of our interior development. The only love that brings true happiness is that which is expressed in a spiritual progress effected in common. Decentration.
And if we are to be happy completely happy we must, third, in one way or another, directly or through some medium that gradually reaches out further afield (a line of research, a venture, an idea, perhaps, or a cause), transfer the ultimate interest of our lives to the advancement and success of the world we live in.
If we are to reach the zone where the great permanent sources of joy are to be found, we must be like the Curies, like Termier and Nansen, like the first aviators and all the pioneers I spoke of earlier: we must re-polarise our lives upon one greater than ourselves. Do not be afraid that this means that if we are to be happy we must perform some remarkable feat or do something quite out of the ordinary. We have only to do what any one of us is capable of become conscious of our living solidarity with one great Thing, and then do the smallest thing in a great way. We must add one stitch, no matter how small it be, to the magnificent tapestry of life; we must discern the Immense which is building up and whose magnetic pull is exerted at the very heart of our own humblest activities and at their term; we must discern it and cling to it when all is said and done, that is the great secret of happiness.
As one of the most acute, and most materialist, thinkers of modern England, Bertrand Russell, has put it: it is in a deep and instinctive union with the whole current of life that the greatest of all joys is to be found. Super-centration.
- Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
(1881 – 1955)
Paleontologist, Jesuit priest and philosopher
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