Alan Watts’ “The Wisdom of Insecurity” redefines happiness

Paula Martin

After a weekend of campfire conversations, listening to my friends’ answers as we reflected on the question of what happiness is, a very influential person’s words came up throughout the night. Alan Watts pinpoints happiness in a person’s presence, and he does so by incrementing metaphysicality in his writings.

Alan Watts wrote “The Wisdom of Insecurity” to save us, to make us draw back into simple, raw, thinking about this world and who we are in relation to it. This stellar, nonfictional piece is like pressing a button that activates our metaphysical thinking.

Metaphysical thinking entails thoughts larger than ourselves, by dictionary referred as “concerned with abstract thought or subjects, as existence, causality, or truth – concerned with first principles and ultimate grounds, as being, time, or substance.” I was once told that we must have at least three metaphysical thoughts per day in order to be present and connected with our environment – specially in the times that we live in, filled with social media concerns and expectations of the future. After reading The Wisdom of Insecurity, my presence in the the present felt reactivated, reborn, enhanced and multiplied.

As written on by Watts on page 35, “If my happiness at this moment consists largely on reviewing happy memories and expectations, I am but dimly aware of this present. I shall still be dimly aware of the present when the good things that I have been expecting come to pass. For I shall have formed a habit of looking behind and ahead, making it difficult to attend to the here and now.”

“Happiness is a spectrum, but most of the times I can pin point on the map are the times when I was fully present – not wishing for the future nor reminiscing in the past,” said Maya Gale, a religion and philosophy student who read The Wisdom of Insecurity.

We all question the roots of happiness and we all form ideals of the future and what it shall be before it comes to us. However, “…the future is quite meaningless and unimportant unless, sooner or later, it is going to become the present. Thus to plan for a future which is not going to become present is hardly more absurd than to plan for a future which, when it comes to me, will find me “absent”, looking fixedly over its shoulder instead of into its face.” To reform our established patterns of thinking of the future before we think of the present is hard, but perhaps the only way of knowing what happiness is is to be fully present to grasp when the moment comes.

All in all, this magnificent piece takes one back into awareness of self, consciousness of the environment and perpetual natural, metaphysical thinking of the present.