Happiness is overrated.
Or maybe I just tell myself that because I’ve never been very. Happy, that is.
Or maybe I have?
I think I need to know more about what happiness IS in order
to know what I mean by not being it. If
you know what I mean. Which I don’t,
obviously.
Happiness is a warm gun?
Not.
A bowl of cherries?
No, that’s a life that’s happy if it’s like a bowl of cherries. Or is that like a box of chocolates?
I’m not getting anywhere. "We must start from where we
are"; somebody said that. So I will.
The “we” will be the royal kind.
For me happiness is sporadic--off and on--and not the off
and on that a bi-polar individual is off and on. I mean like five minutes of happy, forty-five
minutes of miserable, an hour and a half of so-so, and then three minutes of
bliss, followed by a giddy social free-fall and two days of
self-consciousness. Sigh.
I think that I used to be happy long ago when I was very
small and there was less of me needing to need to be happy, or more of what is
NOT me just being, or less of me to get in the way of happy. I don’t know for
sure, but when I go there into the way-back of my tiny person memories I feel a
sort of all-around pleasure at being in the world that might be happiness.
There are things that make me happy to think about. Little things, not the "world
peace" kinds of things that make me anxious because there is just too much
at stake. Soup. Soup makes me happy. And puppies—especially puppy ears and puppy
breath and the way their feet smell like saltine crackers; check it out and
see, they do! And speaking of crackers,
those little round oyster crackers floating in milky tomato soup remind me of
coming home from lunch in the old days when there was still enough time in the
day for kids to come home (and there was
somebody at home to come to) and how I think I was happy sitting at the Formica
table with the little silver specks and swinging my legs above the floor and
blowing on the orangey-red in the shiny bowl of my Campbell’s soup girl spoon
and watching my mother flipping the toasted cheese sandwich to go with it in
the big metal Farberware skillet. The
world was pretty shiny back then. I
guess that was happy.
Pudding makes me happy: chocolate, not butterscotch. Casseroles too. Ice cream is good, but it is too cold to be happy. But the sprinkles are
happy and the hot fudge. Hot is
good. Hot baths, fires, sunshine. I like hot.
Too hot isn’t, though. Hugs are
warm and happy. Silly is happy. Too silly isn’t; it’s an accident waiting to
happen; it’s “somebody’s going to get hurt. . . “
Happy requires the in and out of happy and not. The up and down of life. I’d rather be growing and learning than
constantly UP, wouldn't you? My mother
is mystified by this attitude. We sat at
the kitchen table last summer and we had this conversation:
Mom: Of COURSE you
want to be happy!
Me: Not really. I
think I’d rather be learning and growing.
Mom: I don’t believe
you! You’re being psychological again.
Me: I mean it! And whatdaya mean, “psychological?”
Mom: (SIGH) You
always complicate everything. Why do you
do that? Do you WANT to be miserable?
Me: No, but I don’t
want to be bored. Maybe I AM happier being miserable!
Did I really say that?
Something like it, anyway. See
what I mean? I have no idea what “Happy”
is. It’s a non-word.
Martin Seligman, author of Authentic Happiness and a big
dude in the Positive Psychology movement says that you can’t really change your
happiness setting all that much. Some of
us were just born miserable ("and
we like it that way, MOM" ). Like
the Jews, for instance. I don’t mean the
suffering as a people thing. I mean the
suffering-because-life-is-just-sort-of-disappointing-and-God-doesn’t-seem-to-care-all-that-much-about-you-even-after-he-chose-you-and-what‘s–the-advantage-of-being-the-chosen-people-of-a-God-who-ignores-you-when-you-talk-to-Him
-anyway kind of suffering. The Job kind
of suffering. Look at him. He’s a famous unhappy Jewish person. I can really relate to Job. I’m not a Jew (wrong kind of mother, though
you wouldn’t know it to listen to her, “What a daughter, you’re breaking my
heart). But I don’t know from happy
already. You hear that God?
I don’t think we’re supposed to be happy. We had Eden.
We lost Eden. Real estate happens;
foreclosures for bad-faith contracts;
things go to hell.
Literally. If God had wanted us
to be HAPPY, He/She/It wouldn’t have
given us a self, or free-will, or (says my mother) “children.” Enough with the children bit, Ma! My kids are one of the few things that make
me happy . . . and miserable (why do I feel more like my mother every day?)
Jesus said, “Consider the lily.”
OK. So I’m
considering, but I’m not seeing that we have a lot in common (That free-will,
personality, children thing . . . I wonder if seeds count? “Couldn’t you have fallen on fertile
ground? What is with this rocky soil bit
you're pulling? You’re breaking your
mother’s green, heart!” )
But, maybe the
lily. Try again . . .
Sunlight provided. Water. Soil. Doing her pretty plant thing, turning toward
the light. Living in the present. In the now.
Day lily. Only for a day lily. (Does it know?) Maybe Happiness isn’t the point, but that
kind of trust is, and growth is, and becoming what you are (whatever that is)
is. Being ready to die whenever that happens because you are, in fact,
basically, happy? God looked at creation and said, "it is very good."
That? Yes, that's a kind of happiness I can get behind.
