The struggle for happiness was complex and lengthy for me and will never really end, but it also turned out to be simple, if radical. Sufi wrote that for the raindrop, joy is entering the river.

I learned that I needed to do the same thing.

For me, entering the river meant doing what I was called to do, doing what I wanted to do, scrapping what I had been told and taught, and rejecting whatever one else had been told and told.

My public life as a writer/blogger began in 2007 when I gave up writing for others; I was stunned by the ease and ferocity with which other people felt so comfortable telling me what to do. I frightened many and threatened many more.

I realized that my idea of happiness was, to many people, freakish, selfish, and doomed.

This was challenging for me because I was beginning to understand how our greedy and disconnected society – and very often the people who love us – push us and brainwashes us into not doing what we are called to do and want to do and need to do to be healthy and, for lack of a better word, happy.

When we met for the first time, Maria and I realized almost simultaneously that we had been taught to give up the life we wanted and do what everyone else was doing, making us miserable and living in despair.

We had both been taught one way or another to pour every penny we made into the insatiable Corporate Nation and its insanely profitable idea of the new American experience –  to live in a subservient way we didn’t want, buy things we don’t need, abandon things our heart told us we were meant to do.

We were taught happiness was what was called the American Dream – family, two cards, two or three kids, working for money.

This epiphany connected us and brought us still closer even now.

Maria had been taught that her mission was to marry, have children, and care for her parents when they aged. But she wanted to be an artist. I was taught happiness meant success, prestige, money, and security. But I wanted to be free to do the work I wanted to do.

Her yearning to make art was almost literally killing her. My desire for freedom to creative my own work was as deep.

Neither one of us thought that was possible because that is what we saw and were told.

But being happy, we both learned, is something very different. Just look around you and think about how many happy people you know. Working only for money for strangers who care nothing for us is another form of slavery.

That was my life for decades.

“Being happy is not something that just happens to anyone,” writes Joan Chittister in “Following The Path.”

“It happens,” she writes, “to those who discover who they are and what it is, that’s at the core of them – singing or cooking or planning or calculating. These people understand what it is in them that makes them unique. They discover what they like to do in life, not simply what they do because everyone else does it.”

I’ll be honest with you; this is a painful path to walk; it very often goes against parents, family, friends, and the vast cultural and political machine that now has a virtual monopoly on telling us what we need – never what we want – to live a “prosperous” and secure life.

They do this by turning us against one another, demonizing the helpless, and ridiculing the compassionate. If we actually stopped and talked with one another, we might just discover how cruelly manipulated so many of us have become.

If you give up making money for happiness, you will instantly be branded a freak or worse and pushed to the margins of conventional society. There is no place for you in the visions of the Corporate Nation. If you care about others or Mother Earth, you are “woke.”

No one can tell me what that means, but many people know it is evil.

Most of you friends will melt away.

I decided to be okay with that; it is sometimes lonely but meaningful and nourishing. And many more people out there feel the way I do than I imagined. You just never hear from them.

The idea was to do what I wanted to do the most and do the best. And then choose what I could do with those things to better my soul and the rest of the world.

I consciously focused much of my life on the elderly in assisted care and the refugee children trapped in a new kind of refugee camp – our cities. In doing so, I built an umbilical cord to my past – I owe my life to poor and persecuted refugees – and I found it natural and successful to work with people at the edge of life, from my hospice work to the Mansion.

It was also my way of facing my mortality and understanding how to die well and with meaning and what death looks like.

I chose not to end my life sad and angry. I chose to die well and with dignity.

I decided not to let our fractured and bleeding political system turn me into one of those raging and broken trolls who haunt what we call social media.

Once I felt whole, I found it much easier to do things for others. And that feels so much better than anger and hatred.

I chose not to let any politician with any label from any party or ideology invade my consciousness and choke the goodness out of me. I am not about being blue and red. How shallow to label myself in those ways. Humans are the only creatures on the earth known to think. It’s sacrilege not to use that gift.

Those were good choices for me. I don’t tell others what to do.

I am happy that I love what I do and have achieved clarity of purpose and the soul in giving myself to doing what I am doing.

This work never moves in a straight line; life is much more explosive and exciting than that.

I feel like a raindrop who has plunged into the river. I found joy there; I found my life.