Are you happy? - He asks me from time to time.
I know that look. Her blue eyes water and envelop me. His arms wrap around me, hold me close to him. His forehead leans against my forehead. I close my eyes and do not answer anything. Life could give me a claw, but here and now, next to him, it would hurt less. Any effort and almost any pain is lightened when he looks at me like that.
But sometimes his gaze cannot protect me. Suddenly a crack opens, with its banks and its deep walls of water and ice. If I do as if nothing, the groove continues to breathe, pierce, and stony and arid roads open up in which it hurts to live.
When happiness disappears, it leaves a trail of uncomfortable, painful, or destructive emotions. We all face the incessant challenge of conquering it again, a challenge that for centuries has been considered trivial. It was not known then, as we know now, that happiness is decisive in our mental, physical and emotional health.
Throughout the world and in all ages, humans have wanted to make sense of a fragmented, disorganized and often incomprehensible world. These pages are an invitation to enter the search and the conquest of happiness by the hand of present and past civilizations, of diverse people and territories. The centuries-old experience of those who preceded us in the difficult art of living constitutes a very rich set of wisdom and experience that continues to be strangely valid, although it is often unknown or we have forgotten it.
There is no recipe for happiness or a single way to master it, but there are certain scientific keys and the experience of a multitude of people and communities that come out to meet it and risk discovering it, losing it and conquering it again.
This is demonstrated by the small revolutions of so many readers that I have the joy of incorporating into these pages: they reflect our innate and hopeful capacity to change, modify and improve our lives in a thousand different ways. You will also find here testimonies of philosophers, poets and scientists, an inspiring selection of passionate lives in search of happiness. And as humans also learn to be happy in community, we will travel to meet collective experiences, gestures for happiness that are practiced from Patagonia to Iceland, from South Africa to Thailand or Tibet.
This foreword is also a warning and a reading guide: traveler, make yourself comfortable and breathe. You are going to make a trip as variegated, unpredictable and personal as the own search for wisdom and happiness. The means of transport, the landscapes that surround you and the guides that accompany you will vary throughout these pages ... Every trip is an adventure, and this book is a trip and an adventure. But if you observe before judging, if you get carried away by the changes of time and speed, you will undoubtedly have the
Reward of the wise and patient traveler: you will return home loaded with experiences and ideas that will enrich you.
And it is that in each of these pages, you will see it, they have coexisted without remedy, for centuries, longings, goals, sorrows, failures, missed opportunities and mixed emotions. Because this is life: a kaleidoscope of feelings and circumstances where there is no pain or joy that lasts a hundred years or a day, where everything constantly changes, where the look deceives, the desires are camouflaged, the good and the evil persecute you, the People baffle you, luck finds or dodges you, and dreams are almost always confused with reality. And all that is part of the adventure and the trip that I propose to you.
In the first part of this book, we begin at a brisk pace with the Greek and Roman sages, so close, so familiar, that their wisdom, more than a discovery, is a reunion. Later we will delve more calmly into the poetry and nuances of the ancient Chinese sages, and we will cross the secret door of an alchemical laboratory, before embarking on the journey towards the search for happiness around the world. Finally, hand in hand with great poets, artists, psychologists, neuroscientists and other sages of our time, we will continue to accumulate clues and keys on our journey to happiness.