Thursday, July 29, 2010

Happiness

I wrote this essay for my Washington writer's group. More about them later. Here is the essay...

Let us be grateful to people who make us happy;
they are the charming gardeners who make our
souls blossom.
- Marcel Proust



We all know how to get fit—eat right, exercise with increasing length and intensity and fitness will follow. Is there such a formula for happiness? If there is I don’t know about it.

It seems perfectly natural for people to want to be happy. Who wouldn’t want that? Yet we don’t seem to have perfected the formula. It was Abraham Lincoln who said:

“Most people are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.”

That seems a little simplistic. My friend Julia reminds me that Lincoln’s wife, Mary Todd Lincoln suffered from bouts of clinical depression. Imagine how thrilled she must have been with this quote from her husband! Besides, if it was as easy as making up our minds, we would all do it. I know I would. I love feeling happy. It’s intoxicating. And it’s catching. Nothing can make you happier quicker than being with someone who is truly happy. It’s an elixir that issues forth and feeds our soul. It’s irresistible and all but a few sour spoilers want anything more than to share it, even if only for a while.

It’s the reason we love a champion. Winners attract us like flowers attract bees. We want some of the happiness nectar that they exude. When the winner thrusts his or her arms in the air and grins and maybe even cries a little, we want a piece of it. When the winning team slams itself into a jittering mass, we want to join them. That’s why spectators rush the field and fill the streets—they want to catch a bit of the electricity of happiness that is in the air.

Happiness takes many other forms, of course. There is the utter joy of holding a baby, watching a child at carefree play, observing a child crack his first deliberate joke or hearing that same child perfectly mimic a parental injunction. Nothing can provide more unadulterated joy than your child unless, of course, it’s your grandchild.

Another gentle pleasure is the joy a garden can give. Watching the sparkle of sprinkler water on a well-tended garden through the slight fog of sore muscles and sweat is a very special pleasure. It makes just about anything you do afterwards feel like a well earned reward. A glass of lemonade can easily rival the finest champagne. A hot dog just off the grill is better than any restaurant meal when you can have it after a day in the garden. A close second would be having it at the ball park with the mix of charcoal smoke and new mown grass in your nose and the sound of batting practice in your ears.

All this makes happiness seem easily obtainable. So why isn’t it? What makes it leak away and lets us slide into the more familiar self-critical funk? Perhaps it is a matter of comparison. Alexandre Dumas says:

There is neither happiness nor misery in the world; there is only the comparison of one state to another, nothing more. He who has felt the deepest grief is best able to experience supreme happiness. We must have felt what it is to die, that we may appreciate the enjoyments of life.

That does make some sense. If we are merely endlessly content, how would we even know or appreciate it? Yet who would wish for difficult times in order to enhance our feelings the rest of the time? It is surely true that a life threatening illness or an accident can heighten our appreciation. Does it follow that we must have the angst to appreciate the sweetness of the ordinary day to day calm? Perhaps we do need a little contrast and drama to keep things interesting but, of course, too much of a bad thing can definitely be a bad thing.

What does this have to do with my own personal happiness? I think I am circling around a point here. I’ll try not to lose it again. I have been stressed, depressed and scared to death and yet I think that I am basically a happy person. How can I hold on to that when the dark days come? Or, do I in fact need the dark days to make the happiness shimmer and glow when it does come? Charles Schulz once said:

My life has no purpose, no direction, no aim, no meaning, and yet I’m happy. I can't figure it out. What am I doing right?

Ah, how refreshing. So often we ask ourselves what we did wrong. It’s nice to once in a while wonder what we are doing right. Because of course we are doing some things right or we would never experience any happiness at all. So what is it that makes me happy? I love to laugh. I don’t know if I laugh because I’m happy or I’m happy because I laugh but it really doesn’t matter. It just is.

There are whole schools of thought that recommend that people with serious illnesses watch funny movies or read funny books. That’s all just fine but in my opinion the best laughter is shared laughter--the sort of laughter that you simply can’t explain to anyone later. It just bubbles up and renews itself, like a can of soda that has been shaken before opening. It’s the sort of laughter that makes you fear you will wet your pants but you don’t want it to stop anyway.

My friend Kizzie told me that Norman Cousins calls laughter “inner jogging” and says that it is good for the soul and the body. I can endorse that sentiment.

But what else is there? Mere laughter isn’t enough to cure all our ills. I think it must go deeper. It is connected to the fact that we have people in our lives that we can make laugh and who make us laugh. A good shared belly laugh probably equals an hour with a therapist. We want to explain ourselves because we want so much to be understood, but a shared laugh is understanding on a very deep level and we shouldn’t underrate the value of someone who gets our jokes. They are the ones who keep us sane.

Another important key to happiness is gratefulness. David Steindl-Rast says:

Gratefulness is the key to a happy life that we hold in our hands, because if we are not grateful, then no matter how much we have we will not be happy -- because we will always want to have something else or something more.

Writing definitely makes me happy. Oh, it frustrates me too. But when I finish a piece and it seems to reflect exactly what I meant to say, I am happy. That fails to account for the reason that I spend so much time playing Free Cell or solitaire instead of writing but that’s another topic I think.

The last thing or maybe it’s the first thing is to find something or things that matter to you. We need to make a difference in someone else’s life. We can join up, volunteer, put our hand out. My husband and I started a charity and it has been the most fulfilling thing I have ever done (besides having my children, of course).

So, here are my four keys to happiness:
Friendship
• Laughter
• Gratefulness
• Meaningful work


Everything else is a bonus.

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Thursday, July 22, 2010

Seventy and Counting

I turned 70 today. I should be grateful for that and I certainly am but Holy Cow, how did that happen? Here I am in far northern Washington indulging in a little self indulgence (Okay, a lot of self indulgence if the truth be told) and noticing that 70 feels pretty much like 69. It also feels a lot like 49 and 59 except with more aches and pains. Shouldn’t wisdom kick in about now? Shouldn’t I have figured out what I really, really need to do before I die? It’s right there on the tip of my brain. I want to share some profound insight on this day, July 22nd, 2010, but I keep thinking about the candy store clerk who, when she found out it was my birthday, counted out 70 jelly beans (bubble gum and cotton candy flavors) and wished me a hearty Happy Birthday.

Oh, the day was much more than that. I had a lovely walk along the beach and my friend Kizzie treated me to a delicious lunch at Semiahmoo resort where we had a view of Canada across the water and I drank my first Mohito. We strolled and shopped and enjoyed beautiful scenery along the way. Still my mind returns to those 70 jelly bellies waiting in the bottom of my purse. One for every year. Wouldn’t it be something if I could eat one each night and dream the very best days of each of those years. Now that would be something to write about!

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