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There are two ways of meditating on death. One is the morbid way, which is a kind of avoidance of life and a sense that nothing is worthwhile because it’s all going to come to an end. And the other is the creative way of recognising that your mortality is a fundamental part of all that you hope for. When we fall in love with another person, one is consciously taking under one’s care a mortal being and it’s the sense of her fragility and her mortality which is fundamental to the love that one feels towards her, in my view. And if you try and exclude the thought of death, then that love is weakened. In the sense that she is absolutely dependent on that love and of course will one day escape from it through death. That is absolutely a part of what the love is and why we find in erotic love a kind of redemption. That’s what I would say. I would say as well that it’s an aid to concentration and focus. You don’t have much time and there’s plenty of problems. And so it’s going to be a hard road no matter what. And so get at it. For years when I was in my 20s, the first thought I had when I woke up in the morning was life is short. Really, literally, it happened to me for years. I thought no time to waste then. There’s things to be done, there’s things that need doing. Get the hell up. Make yourself efficient. Name it something that makes the transience of life worthwhile because such things exist. And then do everything you can to manifest everything you can within that mortal frame. And it adds to life a seriousness that would otherwise be absent. I’ll tell you my plumber story because that makes it concrete. I’ve done a lot of home renovation. I’ve worked with lots of workmen. On very creative projects as a matter of fact. And so that was very entertaining because with carpenters for example, we built a quite strange and unique third floor on my house in Toronto. And I invited the carpenters to contribute. I told them what the overall view was and what we were trying to produce. But if they had creative ideas, then I was welcoming them because I wanted them to, I didn’t want to tell them what to do. I wanted to produce something beautiful with them fully on board so that it was likely to manifest itself in the best possible manner. And so that competence that I described in a rather utilitarian manner is almost immediately transcended by something that’s more potent and more valuable in the actuality of it. And if you’re participating in a project like that and you invite people into a reciprocal relationship then the relationship begins to transcend the particularities of the project. And then the project goes wonderfully well. And that is a reflection of something that’s deeper. It touches on something that Sir Roger mentioned, the statement by Christ that if two or three people are gathered together in his name then he’s there. You can infuse every relationship you have with precisely that spirit if you’re cognizant of it and careful and fortunate and far more than that. It’s a thing to strive for and you won’t manifest itself perfectly but that can be there in all the particularities. And so that way you have the singularity of the project itself, the practicality of it. There’s a reason that Christ was also a carpenter, right? That’s the particularity because a house that’s not built on truth does not stand. And so those particular relationships should partake of that divine, the divinity of ultimate reciprocity and then both are elevated. And so the narrowness of, say, capitalist trade is insufficient but it’s embedded in something that when it’s not a zero-sum game it’s embedded in something that’s far deeper than that and far more gratifying. And if you’re careful about such things then the projects that you involve yourself with that are even somewhat mundane can take on a much more beautiful and productive nature. And then that’s, well it’s not frustrating, it’s compelling and it works. I would just add to that that what Jordan has said really is that in a job rightly done the divine is imminent in some way. You know what George Herbert said, you know, who sweeps the rumours for thy laws makes that and the action fine. Okay, we leave out these days the makes drudgery divine bit. But you know, Herbert was absolutely right about that, that if you ask the question where does God enter the ordinary life, it is in that sense of doing something for its own sake and acquiring the habit of doing so and not wanting a reward beyond the thing, which connects with Aristotle’s conception of what a virtue is as well. So one shouldn’t despair that there is a moral education available to us even in a world where there isn’t a formalised and shared religion that will bring that aspect of things to bear on human life. What I would say is that happiness means ultimately your fulfilment as a person. And that isn’t the same as gratification of your desires, it means the kind of transformation of your being such that you can look on what you are and say, for all my faults, I accept that thing. And when an occasion comes to rejoice, you accept it and enter it rather than asking yourself, do I deserve it? You know, that avoidance of joy which many people have is actually itself a kind of narcissism. The happy person goes out and embraces the occasion for rejoicing and he does so because his own nature is at ease with itself and he can incorporate this into it. Of course there’s a lot more to it. Aristotle says happiness is an activity of the soul in accordance with virtue. What he meant was that if you don’t have the virtues, you’re treading always on thin ground, that you will fall through that wonderful moment when at last she is going to say yes. You know, your nature as a predator is revealed. Do you use Jordan’s image? And you fall irrecoverably. But anyway, that’s brief discourse on happiness. Well, I mean, for me, I find a tremendous… First of all, there’s an alliance between happiness and gratitude and you touched on that. If you’re going to accept the tragic reality of life, let’s say, then it’s also reasonable to accept happiness when it comes your way and to be grateful for it. And to be grateful for it is to accept it and to enjoy it while it makes its presence felt. It’s something that visits, I would say. And you can invite that visitation, I would say. I do that primarily by playing. I was very playful with my kids and my wife and still am. Most of the time with my kids, it was non-stop jokes of one form or another. My daughter can barely say anything that isn’t a joke of some sort. And I hang around with comedians all the time and I usually have my best discussions with them. And my best friends when I grew up, especially when I was a young man, were people who were inveterate ironists and joke tellers. And mostly what we did was competitive humor. The whole goal of a social gathering was to see who could say the most outrageously funny thing. And that was unbelievably entertaining. And so if that comes along and you can participate in it and you can play, so much the better. It’s even useful to touch things that are difficult with a playful and light hand, which is partly why I travel with Dave Rubin in my lecture series, because Dave’s a professional stand-up comedian, as well as a serious person in his own right. But all of the very disturbing lectures that I put forward, because I think they are disturbing, are lavend with humor. That’s purposeful. It’s necessary and desirable. But that doesn’t mean that I think that short-term happiness is a goal, which I certainly don’t think that it is.