Discover Life’s Small Joys
Renew your inner desire for true happiness with wisdom, recipes, and products from around the world.
Writer Wendy Guo
We’re fortunate to have made it through the crises of 2020, and as we face the new year, we now find ourselves with a renewed pursuit of genuine health, happiness, and inner peace. With this being our first Magnifissance issue of 2021, we decided there was never a better time to focus on the essence of happiness in all its forms, especially life’s small joys.
For our entire lives, most of us have found happiness through spending time with friends, travelling to new places, going out to eat, shop, or going to the theatre. With all of these taken away or restricted, we’ve had to look inside ourselves to find the essence of what makes us happy. We’ve had to discover new pleasure in life’s small joys and new hope in our broader understanding of the world.
To begin our exploration of happiness, what better place to start than a country that measures its success not by the economic scale of gross national product but by gross national happiness instead? In this issue, we took a virtual tour of Bhutan to examine what makes the people there so happy.
In the ancient traditions of both Buddhism and Taoism, the true happiness of higher realms is expressed with the Chinese word wuwei, which literally translates as “being free.” There are layers of meaning to this word, as there are layers of meaning to freedom itself, encompassing everything from economic freedom, to free movement, assembly, speech, and perhaps most fundamentally, freedom of belief.
For people living in communism China today, nearly every facet of freedom is oppressed. This issue’s cover story features an interview with Jennifer Zeng, a writer and online personality who suffered inhuman persecution in China’s system of labour camps because of her persistence in practicing Falun Gong, a meditation and qigong practice based on the principles of truthfulness, compassion and forbearance.
Her unjust imprisonment, however, didn’t eclipse her desire for freedom. She never lost the sense of gratitude and joy she found through her faith and through understanding the meaning of life.
12/19/2020
