Attached is the full text of "Three Joy in Life":
A wise man summed up the joy of life in three words: contentment, enjoyment and helping others. At first glance, it is very dull; Savor it carefully, which is very meaningful. The three kinds of happiness mentioned in the three words represent the three realms of happiness in life, which are progressive, causal and mutually supportive.
Proverbs such as "the snake swallows the elephant when the heart is lacking", "this mountain looks at that mountain" and "eating what is in the bowl and staring at what is in the pot" show that people's desires are endless and they have the nature of longevity and wealth. A materialist always gains pain. Even if you get a temporary satisfaction, it is only a temporary pleasure. In order to pursue another greater desire, you will immediately fall into the whirlpool of distress. Life is often unsatisfactory, and many desires are difficult to satisfy or even never realized. If you persist in what you get, you will fall into a sea of great losses. As the saying goes, the greater the expectation, the greater the disappointment. "The contented are happy" means that a person should be alert to the endless pursuit of desires, weaken some desires, and shorten the battle line that has been stretched for too long in life, so as to obtain lasting and frequent happiness. Of course, contentment is not blindly negative and shrinking, and it is impossible and impossible to cut desire to nothing. The "sufficiency" of "contentment" is to require people to have a "degree" in the size of their desires. This "degree" is the appropriate limit for realizing a certain desire within their own ability. At this degree, the desire is realized, and it is not good to be unhappy; And beyond this degree, the amount of pain will increase in direct proportion to the size of desire. It can be seen that contentment is the bottom line of happiness in life, and an unsatisfied person will never be happy.
Contentment is also the basis and premise of self-enjoyment. The "harvest" in enjoying oneself is "seeking" and "creating". In other words, a person should be able to find fun in trivial life, "be happy without fun." To do this, we must be satisfied, and contentment will naturally lead to happiness. How can an insatiable person be in the mood to "have fun" and "have fun" Therefore, enjoying oneself is a transcendence of one's own desires and pains, a calm attitude towards the world and a detached attitude towards life. Another meaning of enjoying oneself is that some kind of satisfaction is difficult for others to understand and share. Just as the pain can only be borne by oneself and cannot be replaced by others, the happy mood has nothing to do with others, and only oneself can "know everything" and "forget to eat with joy". Tao Yuanming's artistic conception of "picking chrysanthemums under the east fence and seeing Nanshan leisurely" refers to this. People who can enjoy themselves can generally treat the satisfaction and dissatisfaction of desire correctly, properly handle the "degree" of satisfaction and dissatisfaction, correctly evaluate the gains and losses of themselves and others, and will not fall into an irreparable abyss of pain. This kind of life is a happy life, and this kind of happiness is mostly discovered and created by myself. Otherwise, it's not fun.
Helping others is the highest realm of the three great pleasures in life. It broke away from the self of "contentment" and sublimated into a realm of "giving" and "altruism". A life that can take pleasure in helping others must be a capital life. Compared with contentment and self-enjoyment, it is a higher realm to help others get happiness by weakening their own desires. Helping others is a feeling of "willingness". He gets his own spiritual pleasure-happiness from giving help to others. Small "shed" leads to small pleasure, while big "shed" leads to great pleasure. From the shed, we can find a life value beyond personal interests and obtain a high-level spiritual happiness. Such people are more like people in the social sense, because such people are more needed by a society. A person who has endless desires and is addicted to fame and fortune will definitely not give up, pay or be altruistic, because he just wants to take it and never be satisfied. How can you be happy if you are not satisfied? If you are not satisfied, how can you help others? He is too slow to ask for it! Even if he has a little "happiness", it is only a temporary "happiness" when his desire is satisfied, and he will immediately fall into the anxiety and trouble of pursuing greater desire.
People don't come to the world to find pain, but to get happiness and find happiness. The ancients regarded essence, qi and spirit as the "three treasures" of a person's body. In my opinion, "contentment", "happiness" and "helping others" should be the three treasures of life spirit. A person who doesn't know how to be content can hardly enjoy himself, nor can he be noble enough to help others. If you want to have a happy life, only by understanding the true meaning of these three kinds of happiness can you get a glimpse of the mystery of happiness.
(word 1439)
Attachment: On a whim, I decided to go to the newspaper retail kiosk that I haven't been to for a long time to buy one or two magazines. Seeing several books on thinking and wisdom on display, I thought, how many have I submitted? Is there any success? When I opened the catalogue, I saw my name in the catalogue published in the first half of June 20 13, and the title of the article was "Trilogy of Life".
This article was submitted on May 27th, 20 13, and was not published until June 10, which shows the long turnover period of the magazine. Comparing the published text word for word with the original manuscript, it is found that the editor corrected some punctuation marks and modified some words. Here, I am deeply grateful to Mr. Xin Ran, the editor. His hard work is unforgettable.
Following the article "Polishing Yourself" was first published in the third issue of Thinking and Wisdom in 2004, eight years later, the article "Picking Chestnuts" was published in Science and Education News and published in the ninth issue of Thinking and Wisdom, 20 12. Now we strongly encourage the life essays with more than 1400 words published in the original edition of Thinking and Wisdom.