There is something embarrassing about our obsession with happiness. We chase it like desperate of addicts but with the optimism of gamblers. We rename it wellbeing,  flourishing, fulfilment, but maybe it’s the same. The saying goes “happiness is fleeting” and the weird thing is not that happiness is fleeting but that we continue to search for it as if we could readily achieve it.

Blaise Pascal suggested that this longing is not foolish our search is rooted in something deeper than the memory of fleeting times of happiness. We search for happiness because we once experienced it. Not in fragments or weekend bursts as a whole way of being, an atmosphere pat of our origin story. In his Pensées, he proposes that the human heart carries the trace of a joy it can no longer access. We are not inventing desire. We are remembering it.

But if happiness is so fleeting now why should we continue the search? Why not conclude that happiness is simply a neurological trick, a temporary spike in dopamine that evolution wired into us to keep the species moving?

Pascal refuses that reduction. He says that the very persistence of the search is evidence of something far bigger. We would not hunger for what had never nourished us. We would not ache for a fullness we had never tasted. The restlessness is a clue, and the craving is an echo from the deep.

In trying to make sense of my growing sense nd desire for nature connection I wonder what if Pascal was right about happiness but also what if that explains the desire for creation.  What if the search for happiness was not just rooted in an abstract idea about our need to return to the creator where we experienced true happiness but also to return to the place we experienced it the creation. The fracture we feel is not just vertical but horizontal it’s as much heavenward as earthward?

Because our longing is not only for transcendence. It is for soil, sea air, trees older than our politics and rocks that stood the test of time. Like well-being we speak too casually about “getting into nature” as if it were a hobby, but the relief we feel is rooted in something deep inside us unfurl when we stand under a warm sun?

It is too easy to sentimentalise this and perhaps we do this as a kind of coping mechanism because if we really sat with it we would have to confront something far deeper. The ache to be in creation is not merely aesthetic preference. It is visceral because runs deep in our souls beneath our consciousness whether we recognise it or not. Even those who rarely step beyond concrete still carry it, surfacing as restlessness, as low-grade anxiety, with the suspicion that life is thinner than it should be.

We are longing not just for creation out there. We are longing for something that is deeply within us, because we are not separate from it. Our bodies are made of what the earth is made of. Our breath is shared air. The iron in our blood was forged in stars. The boundary between “us” and “environment” is far more porous than our philosophies admit. So perhaps when we long for forests and oceans and mountains, we are not craving escape. We are craving integration. We are sensing that we once knew ourselves as part of a living whole. That happiness, the deep, steady, unfractured kind was not a feeling but participation.

If Pascal is right that we search for happiness because we experienced it once as part of communion with God, then perhaps that communion was never disembodied. Perhaps the joy of origin was not a private mystical glow but a harmony, Creator, created and creature in right relation. A real belonging, severed but with the possibility of a way back by being saturated in nature and confronting our loss honestly.

We have become the species that can refuse its own embeddedness. We can pave, extract, dominate, and still imagine ourselves autonomous. We have convinced ourselves that we stand over creation rather than within it. But time and time again our bodies betray us, we burn out we feel the need to numb ourselves. We seek stimulation because we have lost saturation in nature.

In older language, suffrage did not mean ballots and polling stations. It meant prayer. Petition. Intercession. A cry rising on behalf of another. I suspect, a universal suffrage is taking place. Creation itself is petitioning for wholeness. The groaning of forests stripped bare, the warming seas, the displaced creatures, these are not only data points. They are lament. But the suffrage is not one-sided our bodies are petitioning too. But we are looking in the wrong places, endless scrolling, compulsive productivity, hunger for experiences, these are distorted prayers.

The tragedy is not that happiness is fleeting. The tragedy is that we have mistaken the flickers for the fire. The brief highs for the home we lost. And so we keep searching, because somewhere beneath our cynicism we know the search is justified.

The universal suffrage of creation and us is a shared petition and we need to wake up to the fact that just earth strains toward renewal so do we.

The environmental crisis is not merely a technical problem it’s also a theological one. Our exploitation of the earth mirrors our exploitation of ourselves. We treat land as resource, and we treat our souls the same way. We optimise, mine, leverage the land and sea because we are too afraid to to sit, to confront the reality of our longing and so we are destroying the thing that could save us.

To find the happiness we once knew is not to escape from creation but through a perfect immersion in it, held within its love and the love of its Maker.