December 29, 2008

• Happiness

  While surfing around Xanga on Christmas Eve, I encountered quite a few cases of the holiday blues and somewhat fewer instances of people who professed to having happy holidays for one reason or another.  I observed some correspondences and similarities among those who were down in the dumps, and couldn’t help noticing how fragile and dependent on external things the others’ enjoyment was.  After leaving some appropriate (I hope) comments, I decided to write about achieving happiness.

  This has proven to be a tougher subject to address than I had anticipated.  I have changed the title several times.  I started out calling it The Secret of Happiness.  That obviously wouldn’t work.  If it were a secret, it would have to be one of the most open of secrets.  I can’t think of one truly happy person who would not be more than willing to spread the joy.  Feelings create feedback loops.  Happiness shared is happiness intensified and multiplied.

  My next working title was, The Key to Happiness.  I discarded that one because it would have led to a short post, one I have already posted.  Then I discarded Some Keys to Happiness, largely because, at about the same time I thought of that one, I started losing my enthusiasm for the project.  To keep my enthusiasm up, I decided to stop dithering over a title and simplify.  Keeping things simple helps keep me from getting in my own way.  When I reread the old post and realized how well it serves as introduction to this one, the words began to flow for me.

  So, here is the place to start:

  

  As the Three Wise Men:  Bob, Baba, and Bobby, said:
  Don’t worry.  Be happy.

  Click any link.  They all go to this page, and I’ll assume, in the rest of this post, that you have already read that one.  This one will expand on the earlier one and go into some actions to avoid, things we often do to make ourselves unhappy.

  Now semantics  rears its contentious head.  When I say, “happiness,” I am not talking about schadenfreude ([noun SHAW-den-froy-duh] taking malicious satisfaction in another person’s troubles), and not the fiendish glee of breaking rules or testing bounds, nor the little hidden smiles of triumph or superiority that are flashed behind someone else’s back.  I am not even talking about pleasure, contentment or satisfaction.  Pleasure is an evoked response, and satisfaction comes as a result of some action.  Of those three, contentment comes closest to what I mean by happiness, but it is too narrow, too specific a case.  One can be happy without being contented, and can be contented in some specific way without being generally happy.

  In a semantic sense, happiness has a few things in common with “love,” another word that is applied to many feelings for which there are also many other, less accurate, and less euphemistic, terms.  For purposes of this discussion, “happiness” does not mean anything but happiness.  Kick up the intensity a bit and we could call it joy.  Boost it over into the transcendental realm and it could become ecstasy, but for now let’s just talk about simple, easy happiness.

  One easy way to stand in the way of your own happiness is to place value on its opposite.  Whether you call it sadness, pain, suffering, sacrifice, fear, anxiety, anger, resentment, righteous indignation, disgust, or irritation, if you cling to the dark side and seek to be unhappy, your choice is made and happiness will elude you.  If you adhere to a belief system (AKA: BS) that inculcates guilt and exalts suffering and sacrifice or casts suspicion on pleasure and happiness, your choice is clear:  give up on ever being happy, or question those beliefs.

  The puritan hated bear baiting,
  not because it gave pain to the bear,
  but because it gave pleasure to the spectators.
  ~Thomas B. Macaulay

  Another way to prevent your own happiness is to place conditions on it:  “I’ll be happy when…”  “_____ makes me happy.”  “Happiness is a _____”  Again, my mind draws a parallel with love.  Any love that comes with conditions is a lesser kind of love.  Expectations, conditions, and demands are as corrosive in a loving relationship with another as they are in a happy relationship with oneself.  If we have no expectations, we will have no disappointments.  If we make no demands of others, there is no way they can let us down.  Needing to control others destroys happiness if we fail, and can be destructive in even more ways if we succeed.

  Self-control (<<different link, to a little set of self-control tools), if not carried to pathological extremes, is a different matter.  I don’t mean to imply that we can’t have standards for our own behavior, but I’m saying that those standards need not place happiness out of our reach.  Failure can make a person miserable or, with a slight change of attitude, it can make a person re-evaluate a strategy, change direction, try again or try harder, and succeed.  Success can bring feelings of justified pride, or satisfaction, or accomplishment, but it doesn’t necessarily bring happiness.  Happiness can be there for us at every step of the process.

  My realization that I was responsible for my own feelings did not hit me all at once in a blinding flash.  First, I accepted responsibility for my negative feelings and stopped blaming other people for them.  The fact that I had the power to do that — that I could, by choice, not get my feelings hurt by anyone, or be made angry or disappointed, confirmed what I had been told about personal power and responsibility.  Gradually, it dawned on me that if other people couldn’t make me angry or sad or suicidal, and had never had that power, I had done all that to myself.  From there it wasn’t exactly a giant step to choosing happiness for myself.

  I think it is okay to be happy even when surrounded by unhappy people.  Our unhappiness cannot relieve that of others.  My personal standards require me, among other things, to work to help and heal myself, others within my circle of influence, and the planet in general.  Note that I said, “work to,” and not, “help and heal.”  Success, when it comes, or any little sign of progress, has its rewards, but the effort itself allows me to feel I’m earning my oxygen.  I’m not placing any demands on anyone to accept my help, nor on myself to do anything that might be beyond my own means.  I’m not attached to results, I’m just enjoying the process.  I’m happy.
  

  • 7:54 pm
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