Happiness is

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.