佚名/Anonymous
一个大学生曾和我说：“我不需要快乐——我只要成功。”这是一个奇怪的思想对比。她不需要快乐——“只要成功”。她将这两者对立起来。对学生而言，今天的言就是明天的行。他们所说的话很具有代表性，每个人都会努力奋斗，只是这种努力往往不易觉察。记得上大学时，校报上有一篇文章的标题是这样的：《为什么我们不快乐》。这个标题表明：我们感到快乐在缺失。然而，至少我们仍在寻找。像那个追求成功的学生一样，许多人宁愿放弃快乐，这是为什么呢？
为了确保周一的工作进度，我在周日也常常加班。这实际上是提前对未来一周的工作感到焦虑——担心会发生意想不到的麻烦，或觉得自己在某些方面做不好。但我通常在正常上班的日子做得很不错。我担心的很多事从未发生过。快乐自有其道德基础。快乐的完整性让我们不得不考虑自己应该做什么样的人。当然，一些不怎么光彩的行为也会衍生快乐。但是，要想体验快乐，我们就得付出更多。正是快乐，让我们体会到事物的可贵之处。真正的快乐需要作出选择，这些选择可以养成习惯，从而形成性格。这是我们无法推脱的。因此，获取真正快乐的首要一步就是减少忧虑——这个关键的第一步能让我们远离忧虑。它要求我们勇于接受毫无预想的一切，坦然面对生活中的不完美。
A college student once told me：“I don’t need to be happy—just successful.”It’s an odd juxtaposition.She needn’t be happy—“just successful”.She places one in opposition to the other.Students are today’s expressions of tomorrow’s practices.Their words can be the visible signs of the less visible struggles encountered by us all.I have a memory from my own undergraduate years of a headline in my campus newspaper：Why Aren’t We Happy？As the headline suggests，we fell short of leading joyful lives.Yet，at least happiness was still on the agenda.What underlies the tendency of many of us，like my success-seeking student，to give up genuinely trying？I’ve often failed to enjoy Sunday because of my schedule on Monday.At bottom，it was simply anticipatory anxiety over the work of the week ahead—fear that there would be unexpected complications or that I would fail to measure up in some way.Usually，when Monday came，I did quite well.Much of what I worried about never happened.Joy has its own moral underpinning.There’s a completeness to joy that does not allow us to exclude our sense of the person we should be.Pleasure is certainly possible in less-than-honorable actions.But the experience of joy requires more；it is pleasure taken in worthy things.
True joy requires choices that develop into habits that evolve into character.And that’s work we can’t delegate.The essential first step is trying to live a less fearful life—one that avoids collapsing life’s possibilities before exploring them.It entails welcoming uncertainty and comfortable incompleteness.
