Rainbows, Happiness and Risk

The more money and material goods we have, the more we want - and the less they bring us satisfaction.

The real key to feeling good it seems is to give and keep on giving.

When we stop putting a monetary value on what we do, it is immensely liberating.

We also have an obsession with happiness as though it were yet another purchasable product.

As a child I once tried to stand in the end of a rainbow to feel the colours on me. I ran back and forth across a wet field with friends shouting directions across the cow pats.

But rainbows can't be seen from close up.

And the irony of happiness as a product is that it disappears when we look directly at it, as ephemeral as that rainbow.

When we are young we jump into a pool whether we can swim or not.

We have no fear.

Either we swim or we drown.

Before the age of thirty important things happen to us which shape the rest of our lives.

The first is:

We become aware of ourselves and our own thinking. We reach the age of reason.

The second is:

In our new-found maturity we begin to think in a more adult way.

We become grown up.

Recklessness and risk are not compatible with age.

Risk becomes something which must be carefully considered.

Or is it!!!



Sculpture by the Sea, Bondi, Sydney, Nov 2004 - Learning to fly