Contemplating Happiness February 5, 2009

Contemplating Happiness

Happiness is….

I’m guessing that if you got 10 people to finish the sentence above, you would likely get as many different ideas.  The concept of  happiness has been one of continual evolution in my life.    It has only been recently that I have realized my conflicted feelings on this subject, no doubt resulting from harboring remnants of all the aforementioned evolutions of the word, but it is amazing to see the regularity at which the subject has been rising up under my feet.  But I think for any of this to make sense, I have to map out the crooked road by which I have come to my current views on the subject.

My first memories of actually contemplating happiness were as a child when my father was putting me to bed and would implore me to ‘always be happy’.  I can only assume this statement was in response to the overflowing and naturally occuring happiness that exists in children and was being exhibited by me.  Children are irresistable to us grown-ups, they draw us in like magnets; the most grumpy adult will generally melt at the sight of a laughing baby, and I believe this is a large element of the attraction–joy is our natural state of being and children, for the most part, still remember that and do not resist it, grasp at it, nor feel some stifling sense of guilt over it.  They simply are.  

I remember as a child being keenly aware of the unhappiness of adults.  I didn’t understand this unhappiness, and basically did not question it’s validity, but I did question my right to be happy when they were not.  My naturally flowing happiness became painful to me as I saw myself in contrast to others around me, and that is the moment I began to grow up and leave joyous childhood behind.

When I was in my late twenties I was going through a divorce and someone actually said to me, “You know, God did not promise us happiness.  Suffering is a sacrifice we make to him; if you let happiness direct your life, it will lead you down the wrong pathway.”  Luckily for me, my mental instability was making it very clear that regardless of what God felt about happiness, I could not live without it and would likely end up in the hospital if I didn’t pursue some measure of it.

Since that time, I can pretty much look at all the wonderful things in my life and find a common element–they all originated from my desire to be happy.  I know that whether religious or just simply reflective, most of us are wary of basing anything on happiness.  The religious thought is that our heart cannot be trusted, therefore to be directed by your happiness is pretty much a risky business, however, I find it ironic that our ability to create suffering for ourselves seems to never be viewed with the same suspicion and caution.  The generally spiritual approach is wary of happiness because it is illusive, always just out of reach and makes empty promises of fulfillment with the attainment or achievement of things that can keep you chasing after them your entire life without any self-realization.  But I’m just coming to realize that at the heart of both of these views is a very grown-up misunderstanding of happiness.

Why, as adults, do we associate happiness with things or circumstances instead of a state of being?  The question never entered my line of sight until this last year when I began attempting to choose my thoughts, thereby choosing my moods.  Good feeling thoughts = good feeling mood.  Seems simple enough.  However, I was so convinced that my mood was determined by my circumstances that it took me months to even grasp the concept that the reason it seems that way is that our moods are determined by our thoughts, which 99% of the time are determined by our circumstances.  It’s such a consistent formula, that at some point most of us feel tossed here and there by the circumstances of life, feeling powerless to control much of it, and doomed to feel certain ways about it.

Children are naturally joyous, regardless of the things they have or the circumstances that surround them.  In time, most of our children are taught by example to begin to believe that our circumstances determine our level of happiness, and we can’t control most circumstances.  I have been thinking this way for so long, I have actually found that on certain subjects I actually have an aversion to thinking thoughts that make me feel good about it.  I’m much more comfortable feeling miserable or hopeless or powerless about it, even though I may wish with everything in me to change it.  That’s what I was thinking when I was painting “Contemplating Happiness”–happiness is a choice, as cliche’ as that sounds, and when I am insisting on feeling rotten about something, I really can choose something else.  The joy we were born with is still available at all times, but most of us have forgotten that.  And like all things we’ve forgotten how to do, it just takes practice to become so good at it that it feels natural.