"So, how exactly, do you decide to be happy?" My friend looked bemusedly at me as she replied to my statement that I thought happiness was a decision we made.
"LOOK
at that tree!" I exclaimed loudly and with vehemence, knowing that my
reply to her question required more than a little explanation.
My psychologist husband entered the fray by asking "Lin, when was one of your happiest times in your life?"
Silent
for a moment, I thought about his question and reviewed major events in
my life; hallmarks of 'happy' events asking myself if there were any
times I could recall as being especially salient of happy times-
graduations, becoming a Catholic, our marriage and then repeated what
I'd said to our friend earlier but with different words. Happiness is a
state of being achieved through will, like faith, like love.
One
of the difficulties about happiness is that it's definitional. Happiness
is unique to each of us because, by definition, each of is solitary,
exclusive, an individual, with widely varying interests, skills, goals
and desires: the desire for happiness is however, universal: We each
want to be happy. We even wrote it into our Constitution: The
'unalienable right to the pursuit of happiness," Jefferson wrote, as if
happiness were an object we must chase, hunt, inferring perhaps, an
elusive goal.
The strong belief I have that happiness is a
decision does not preclude any and all of the constant and realities of
the varying emotional states that wander in and out of my psyche; rather
happiness is a constant, a grounding, an undercurrent on which emotions
appear and disappear, like the clouds in the sky. One of the obstacles
to achieving a state of happiness is the belief that happiness is a
feeling. A confusion which permeates two other decisions which are often
confused with feelings for many of us: Love and Faith.
My non
sequitur reply to my friend's question encompasses in four words what I
consider to underlie the wisdom of happiness taught to me by a man
earnestly in pursuit of a happiness which was eluding him, causing him
to walk away from his ordination as a Catholic priest, to search for his
own happiness by teaching young students like me what he was learning
about happiness.
Frequently quoting Santayana's short poem or warning as it seemed to me back then,
Most people live their lives in the basement of a three story house
my
teacher taught me and invaluable lesson about happiness at a time in my
life of great, deep and painful unhappiness and it is this.
If you want to be happy, then act
as if you are, take time to... LOOK at that tree!" Over time, the
feeling will come, the knowledge that yes, I am happy... exactly like
faith and love.
Although his admonition was metaphorical, there
were many times during that phase of my life when nothing was clear and
when I had no ground to walk on, no clue as to how I wanted to spend my
life, only vague resolutions, that I would pull over to the side of the
road and do exactly that. I would LOOK at that tree.
