Happiness

Happiness

For citizens of the United States, there are few more profound certainties than that
happiness is good, possible, and to be pursued. The very right to the pursuit of
happiness is immortalized in the Declaration of Independence, after all: So
important a right as to serve as a cornerstone of an entire government and system
of social thought. Growing out of the philosophy of the Enlightenment, in
particular the Utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham and John Stewart Mill, the
Declaration of Independence holds out a vision of human existence in which
happiness and the effort to achieve it are integral to human nature, and have an
inescapable effect on human life and government.

That is a mighty concept, and one that is becoming integral to the outlook of most
modern-aligned societies and individuals. The hunt for happiness is central to
many of us. And, yet it often seems that very few achieve happiness, even in “free
nations.” Happiness, far from being easy to identify, or easy to pursue in a logical
fashion, remains elusive, complex. Sometimes stunningly durable and strong,
surviving in the face of war, famine, disease, and devastation; other times seeming
as fragile as frost-blossoms on a windowpane, melted with a warm breath.

The sensible, practical idea of happiness as a concrete, obtainable something often
fails when put to the test of life. And, yet, there are few of us who do not desire
happiness. We struggle and yearn for happiness; we rate our success and failure in
terms of how happy we are. We rate our success as parents with how happy our
children are, and our value in our professions with the happiness of our clients. Our
desire to be happy, and to give happiness to others, is so intense that people plan
their entire lives around it. Booksellers make much of their annual profit selling
self-help books intended to allow people to increase their happiness in one way or
another: make more money, lose more weight, enjoy better marriages, get better
jobs, and more.

The conflicting versions of advice regarding the best route to happiness make a
tangle few can easily navigate. What one person recommends, another shuns.
There are, however, old traditions and new wisdom that, together, do point to some
obvious – and not so obvious – truths about happiness, what it is worth, and how to
g et i t .

The Choice for Happiness

Perhaps the most vital error we humans make regarding happiness is the mistake of
thinking it is caused by things outside ourselves, rather than generated inside
ourselves. That mistake is critical, leading us to apply the least effective methods
for “pursuit of happiness” to our lives, rather than using the best practices known
to humans over all our history.

It is an easy mistake to make. First, we tend to confuse happiness with pleasure:
These are not the same thing, precisely. Pleasure is responsive: One takes pleasure
in a good book, a delicious meal, good companionship, bright mornings, crisp fall
weather, great basketball games, and more. We can also take pleasure in
accomplishments, realizations, and other abstracts. The point, though, is that
pleasure is dependent on external elements.

Further, pleasure tends to be fleeting. Try to enjoy a dinner for hours and hours on
end – it will not work even if it is a feast. By the end of the hours either you have
been stretching a single cup of soup out until it is cold and flat, or you are stuffed
as a result of gorging all that time on dish after dish. In either case, you are not
pleased, and you are certainly not happy.

Pleasure in music lasts the time the music is made, and flickers through the mind
again associated with memory; but when the music becomes an earworm, playing
round and round and round your brain, it stops being pleasure-filled. A perfect
perfume either dies to your sense of scent, or becomes penetrating and too
invasive. A new job may please you for years, but the pleasure does not extend to
the times you are not at work – and even the best job has times when it is
frustrating, or boring, or stressful, or just plain not what you want to be doing at
any given moment.

Pleasure is not happiness. External experiences, outside forces – they can support
or challenge one’s ability to be happy, but they do not control happiness.

Because pleasure is not the same thing as happiness, and is created by outside
forces that do not necessarily fuel happiness, any attempt to be happy that is driven
by the pursuit of externals is about as futile as trying to fill your car’s gas tank with
ham sandwiches. Your own mouth would like them – take pleasure in them. But
the car would not – nor would those sandwiches allow the car to carry you one step
closer to happiness.

Victor Frankl was one of the greatest and most powerful voices discussing
happiness and its internal nature in our lifetimes. A Holocaust survivor and

psychoanalyst, he chose to provide witness through his work with his patients and
his writings that happiness was not seated in external sources, or powered by mere
pleasure.

Dr. Frankl, his wife, and his parents were taken prisoner and incarcerated in
Theresienstadt in 1942. In 1944, Dr. Frankl was transferred to Auschwitz and from
there to Turkheim. During his time in various camps he served as a doctor, a
psychiatrist, and as slave-labor. He experienced the broad range of miseries, terrors
and fears offered by the camps, and dealt daily with the effects of those fears and
torments on others. His wife and parents died in various concentration camps
during the period of the war, and when he was eventually freed, he was freed into a
world forever altered, both in the broadest of terms and in the most minute levels
of his personal life.

Dr. Frankl continued to serve as a psychoanalyst after the war, and became
increasingly interested in the nature of human happiness. In his time in the camps,
he had seen the many ways individuals responded to their imprisonment and to the
barbarities they suffered, and he had seen that there were those who, even in
situations as dire as the camps, seemed able to find happiness.

In his own practice, also, he found people drew their happiness not from external
pleasure, but from the relations between the inner and outer world, with the outer
providing goals, dreams, relationships, and the inner providing the ability to
resolve and commit to the external world. Not pleasure, but understanding and
meaning created “happiness.” In time he came to believe that happiness grew from
the way people perceived their own existence – an internal understanding of their
relationship to an external world – rather than being “made happy” by externals.

Frankl did not disdain pleasure, as some traditions would, nor did he espouse any
forms of asceticism as such. He understood that the pleasure of engagement with
the world – fleeting though it might be – enriched and embroidered the experience
of life, and that each tiny pleasure could enhance happiness. However, he did not
confuse those pleasures with happiness itself; they contributed and supported, but
did not cause happiness.

Modern Existentialism Meets Buddhism: Happiness as Enlightenment

Frankl ultimately founded what is called the “Third Viennese School of
Psychotherapy,” logotherapy or Existential Analysis. Existential Analysis focuses

on the goal of helping individuals find the meaningful elements of their lives and
the meaning of their own existence as they understand it. Frankl’s assumption is
that this meaning will be an integration of inner and outer realities, in which a
person invests himself in the very actions of life aimed at constructive work on
relationships, ideals, causes, and other externals – in essence, Frankl’s school
defines meaning as relationship between the inner and outer, and happiness as what
occurs when that relationship is recognized, supported, and expressed. Frankl
perceived this as possible in any context or situation; for all that the mind and heart
aimed outward, the force and the dream welled up from an internal source, and
could be projected beyond immediate circumstances.

This philosophy of happiness is both similar and different from the understanding
of happiness in older traditions. Buddhism, for example, came in time to consider
happiness to only come from letting go of the outer world, and of connections to
that world. The Buddha, recognizing that all beings suffered, and that the suffering
was caused by attachment and emotional investment in other things, argued that
happiness could only be achieved when suffering was ended as a result of giving
up attachment. In some schools of Buddhism, this evolved into strict religious
asceticism, which dedicates making huge efforts to sever their commitment and
investment in all the illusory things of the external world.

Yet even this ascetic version of Buddhism involved a slow, steady arc toward
Frankl’s position – for the goal of Buddhism was to pass beyond an illusion to the
true meaning of a world that was far greater than any one mind, but which
contained all minds. Happiness – true happiness – came when the meaning of inner
and outer worlds was understood and resolved in “nirvana,” and the individual
became part of the world’s greater meaning, rather than having his or her own
small meaning. In short, the ideal of Buddhism was to reintegrate inner and outer
worlds, ultimately. The phrasing and the discipline was quite different, but the
underlying recognition of happiness being based in how the inner self stood in
relation to a vastly greater whole.

A classic Zen Buddhist saying touches on the central core of Buddhist
understanding of enlightenment and happiness: “Before enlightenment; chop
wood, carry water. After enlightenment; chop wood, carry water.” The outer
conditions for happiness do not change; what changes is the enlightened person’s
relationship to the world around.

This is, in truth, not so different from Dr. Frankl’s position, though it approaches
from a very different angle. Both traditions are working to bring a human mind and

heart into an alignment with the world where, regardless of conditions, the person
feels in harmony with themselves, their role, and their integrity with the world
around them.

It would be wrong to say they are “the same.” These two approaches to happiness
rise out of different men’s minds, different cultures, and radically different
traditions. What unifies them is the underlying topic: Happiness and how to obtain
it.

The Nature of Happiness:
Being in the Moment

If happiness depends on finding some meshing of inner and outer lives, and inner
and outer meaning, how does it work? It sounds very insightful and profound when
written up in stately prose, but what is the trick? How do you live a life in which
happiness is just what you are, not what you are racing around trying to become?

Do you have to climb a Tibetan mountain, find a guru, and ask for the True
Meaning of Life or a special mantra that will zoom you into the happiness zone
when you start to chant? Do you have to spend a fortune on therapy to work out
what your own, true, hidden inner “meaning” is?

Well, maybe – if that is how you work best. But most consistently happy people
managed to find their way to happiness without shaving their heads and putting on
a monk’s habit, or flying to Vienna to find the next Frankl, or entering a
Benedictine monastery and following the steps of Thomas Merton up his seven
story mountain. Happiness is a human thing, one we all feel in fleeting moments,
and the capacity to reside with one’s roots deeply sunk into happiness is a
commonplace human capacity. Though few become perfect saints of happiness,
radiating perfected joy, most of us can come close without resorting to extremes.

The first aspect of finding happiness, though, is to stop looking for it. As I have
written, happiness is not found outside you – or even inside you. It is not a thing
you find. It is a way of living, and of relating to the world around you. You do not
find that, you live it, day by day.

The first place to start in learning to be happy – consistently, reliably happy – is
with your own “sweet-spot.” Any aspect of your life, at all, in which you can act
and feel centered and “right with the world.” It may be as simple as knitting, or

cooking for a family. It may be singing in a choir, or saying daily prayers. For
some people, it is texting friends.

Think about that one thing that is or was a safe, happy retreat in your life. In most
cases, you would find that on some level it is not about “pursuing happiness.” It is
about doing things – living things. A singer, in frustrated concentration, reaches to
hit a difficult note in a complexly patterned piece of music; at that moment,
frustrated and groping, she is still happy, doing something which she feels holds in
her proper place with the world. A knitter, turning a sock heel, scowls and focuses
on his stitches – and is still content, looking no farther than the next stitch for his
happiness.

The beginning of constant happiness comes with living each moment in the same
focused, interested, aware way that the singer or knitter is living. If, in time, you
can learn to let go of “I like,” and “I don’t like,” and all the other “I” thoughts we
all think, and instead learn to let go and simply do with attention and energy,
happiness follows.

As a child I was bad at mathematics. Terrible. I hated it. The language of
mathematics teachers was not the language I understood at all. Further, like many
children, I was just plain grumpy about having to do what I did not easily like.
Children do not realize how many things stop being irritating when you let go of
the entire issue of whether you like them or not. I certainly did not realize it.

So every time I had to do mathematics, I was mostly busy not-liking. I was not
multiplying, or dividing, or trying to add fractions, I was far too busy; the not-
liking chore was taking up all my mind and energy. Worse, the not-liking was not
really much fun. Being sulky and sullen tends to make us feel more sulky and
sullen.

For years I kept on being not-good at math. Then I was old enough to just avoid it
entirely unless balancing my check-book or figuring out a length of time passed in
an article on history. You would think I would be happier now that I did not have
to do that horrible math. But you know what? I cannot say I was remarkably
happier. There were still plenty of other things to be sulky about.

Then there came a time in my early 30s when I realized I needed to be able to do
some forms of programming – I cared about using mathematics. Poor me! I had
been slacking in math my whole life, and now I wanted that set of math skills I had

avoided so long. No cure for it but to sign up at the local community college and
finally, finally learn math properly.

This time around, though, I was an adult, and I had learned a few things. I had a bit
more discipline and a lot more experience, and at the very least I knew I could not
afford to spend all my time sulking and making myself grouchy rather than
learning the lessons. So I decided to work at it without the emotional baggage. No
room for happy or sad, I thought: No “I don’t like.” It was going to just be a job,
and I would do it, and no wasted anguish. I would focus on the work itself and that
is all. No matter how muddled I got, I would treat it like I treated knots in my
knitting: A problem I could solve with patience and without much emotional fuss.

Now, here is the thing: Like magic, when I just started doing math, I started liking
math. Each little step added to the next, each new skill carried me a bit farther, and
I found that just as I enjoyed the focus of unpicking knots in yarn, I also liked the
focus of doing algebra and trigonometry and eventually calculus. Indeed, the
further I went, the more I liked it. One day I woke up and realized I actually loved
calculus. I loved the way entire complicated problems seemed to zip up in a single
elegant move; I liked the way I could make the numbers describe things as surely
and gracefully as I could make my pencil describe the shape of a flower petal when
I drew.

When I did calculus without all that sulk and grouch, I found I was happy. The
core skill was in my focus – on simply setting aside the emotional baggage and
doing the work in the moment, as though nothing else mattered. When I honored
the math with my proper attention, the math and I came to terms with each other,
and I lived my moments of calculus being nothing more or less than just a person-
doing-math.

For Better or Worse

It is all well and good, you may think, to set aside the emotional baggage when
dealing with mathematics – or with daily chores like dishes or taking out the trash.
We may learn to hover in an enlightened state while chopping wood and carrying
water. But there are plenty of things we cannot experience without baggage.

That is, and is not true. As humans, we are involved in our reactions – as involved
in pain as in pleasure. We experience things very intensely, and we do not always
even think it is healthy not to experience the full spectrum of human feeling. And,

yet, there is a difference between becoming a cold zombie and learning to hold a
central calm and assurance in life.

Let us consider Dr. Frankl again. He was given a chance to both study and
experience the intense range of human fear, anger, despair, and grief present in the
concentration camps of WWII. He went on, as a psychoanalyst, to also deal with
the profound pain and suffering of ordinary people experiencing other intense and
painful crises. He found that people could, in the face of that emotional maelstrom,
still find “happiness.” Not ha-ha happiness: Frankl believed in far too high a
degree of compassion and connection to have approved of such a separation
between painful truth and internal response.

Instead, he recognized a form of ability to continue to remain in aware, involved
connection with life and with the vital things valued by individuals. Asking many
in therapy why they did not commit suicide, he found that each had things that kept
them in alignment with life itself; things of such worth and meaning that in the face
of brutality, fear, grief, pain, disease, and loss, they could not only continue, but
fully engage. This would not be many people’s immediate definition of happiness,
and yet it often did involve a form of joy.

Learning the Skills of Happiness

We have discussed that happiness does not come from trying to gain external
things, and that its core element is balancing inner and out worlds and infusing
them with meaning. We have moved on to talk about developing a practical,
everyday approach to this apparently monumental and mystic task.
We have considered that on a daily basis this involves focusing on actions and
setting aside emotional baggage we might otherwise wrap around those actions: No
moping over math lessons, for example. And we have discussed that the same
focus and clear-headed approach to living can at least help even in extremes of
pain and crisis.

In spite of that, the road to becoming a happiness-saint is not one many of us
manage to travel very far. If we want to we have to start pursuing skills – not
happiness itself, but skill in dealing with daily life.

The first skill is the skill of commitment to living in the moment. That is a term
you see rather often in certain circles; it too often means becoming obsessed with
the feelings and impulses of the moment, and denying the importance of the past or

future. While that particular meaning can lead to pleasures, it seldom leads to
sustained happiness. Why? Because it denies the possibility of living in the
present, learning from the past, and aiming for the future, rather than just
developing tunnel vision and huddling in the right-now alone.

It is a simple truth: The only moment we can live in is the present. We can
remember the past, but it is gone – we can only learn from it and savor the
memories it offers. But we can only remember in the present. Likewise, we can
only prepare for the future, and that can only happen in the right-here-and-now.
Now is all we have.

It is getting now right that is so very hard.

Happy living depends on structuring your life so that you can, and do grow beyond
past mistakes, do devote enough time to preparing for possible futures, but mainly
do so in the framework of your present life – a life which should be full of
concrete, clear actions you find meaningful and worthwhile.
Many of us cannot manage any one of those goals, much less all of them. To
improve we have to develop strategies for better living. The best place to begin is
to focus our lives first on those things we already believe are meaningful.

Remember the suggestion that you figure out what things already make you
happy? Knitting or gardening or singing in choir? Keep those, and go one further:
Ask yourself which activities you face daily are things you, personally, truly
consider important. Be tough about this, do not allow yourself to start out by listing
the stuff that is merely practical There is room for you to get to that, but begin with
the activities that you really feel add a sense of value and service to your life.

Do you docent for a local museum, and feel that is one part of every week you look
forward to with a thrill? Do you play with your child, planning with interest the
trips to the zoo, or the walks by the beach, or the quiet afternoons with construction
blocks? Maybe Friday night’s start of Shabbat or Sunday Morning Mass is the true,
shining center of your week. Maybe your daily prayers matter, or the hour you
spend in meditation.

The happy man or woman makes these things the anchor of their daily life. Yes,
you may need to wait until Sunday for Mass – but as Sunday approaches, you can
prepare for it and usher it in with joy. Further, you can expand your involvement,
when you know what adds meaning to your life. If your docenting is what thrills
you, you can choose to devote time every week to learning more about your areas

of expertise. Taking classes, developing related skills, and even giving classes to
others – each may extend your involvement in your center of happiness.

Daily life must still proceed around these anchoring activities, but the positive
focus you gain from regularly doing those things that either make you happy or
give your life meaning will begin to have an effect on even the small and boring
actions. Consider that brushing your teeth, washing the dishes, and taking out the
trash all become behaviors that help support your “great and good” activities; they
are the foundation on which all the rewarding actions rest. They become important
in their own right, for that reason – if you encourage yourself to realize the service
they provide you.

You then have to develop a structure in time.

The Catholic Church year provides many Catholics with a time structure that itself
gives meaning to their daily lives. Cycling around over and over, the ecclesiastical
year moves from Advent to Christmastide, from Lent to Easter, through the long
months of Ordinary Time marked only by saint’s days and seasonal reminders –
the progress informs the devout, giving a shape and mood and tone to each portion
of the year. Within that meaningful cycle, the acts of the day and the plans for
tomorrow are held. Memories of the past are marked off by the landmarks of the
year: The baby was born on Easter Day; Dad got that job just as Advent was
beginning.

Secular lives, too, have structures in time, symbolic and ritual patterns that define
the shape of our lives. Labor Day, school starts; Fourth of July, we picnic.
Teachers become entirely conditioned to the first day of school, winter pageants,
mid-winter doldrums, early spring testing, spring break, prom, and graduation – the
landmarks of an academic year. Unfortunately, many of us are cut off from that
sort of stately, meaningful sense of time.

For happiness, our human minds and hearts need the rhythm and ritual of marked
time. To live in an unmarked tunnel makes most of us feel cast adrift, cut off from
life and meaning. It is important to actually make an effort to return that sense of
pattern to your life, if you are lacking it.

There are many ways to replace that time marker. Even the act of always taking a
class or two can add so much sense of punctuation in time to your life. Local
community centers and community colleges offer courses, and these can bring you

a power sense of time coming and going, while getting you out of any ruts you
have settled in and keeping you alert and learning.

Set up landmarks in your year and commit to them. Mark them on your Outlook
calendar with reminders. Make dates ahead of time to celebrate your own
scheduled holidays with friends and family. Plan events – they can be small, but
they should be honored.

Why will this help ensure your happiness? For many reasons, actually. First,
humans simply function better with a framework to mark out time, on a scale a
human can easily comprehend. Days, weeks, months and years have proven to be
very effective blocks for human time-processing. Just as humans work better with
a language to speak, or a culture, we work best with a way of marking and thinking
about time. Second, the technique of marking and celebrating our preferred
“holidays” is a way to reinforce and support the meaningful elements of our own
lives. More still? It is fun. It keeps us socially active. It allows us to both honor
and occasionally laugh at our own mental and cultural landmarks. Whether we are
celebrating common Christmas or Purim or Nowruz festivals, or are creating our
own – “First Summer Movie of the Year,” “Beach Day,” or “The Annual
Campout” – we add a special sense of importance to our own reality.

What we do is worth marking, worth planning for, worth sharing with friends, and
worth celebrating. It is possible that to be able to believe that completely and
utterly is itself happiness. For most people, unhappiness lies in a feeling of
worthlessness, pointlessness and lack of meaning. The determination to mark one’s
time and actions and rejoice in them is a powerful attack on that sort of apathy and
despair.

Within the skeletal framework of a calendar it becomes possible to weave a
complex web of actions. All the activities we have already discussed become
shining facets within the larger structure. A year becomes not just an unmarked
expanse of undifferentiated days. Instead, a year becomes a clear arc of specific
actions, some daily, some weekly, some monthly, and some rare yearly events.
You and your actions have content and perspective.

Added Value, Added Meaning

If you have accepted that happiness is not found in pursuit, but in living
meaningfully, and have already done the basic chores to sort the meaning from the

dross of your life, and it still seems to come up short, it may be time to start asking
yourself what you are not doing that your heart and mind know you should be
doing. The truth is most of us believe in valid, vital and important ideals, goals and
standards which we then ignore. We believe in charity, but fail to practice it. We
believe that the sick should be visited, but we do not happen to be the ones who
visit. The entire world calls out with things that should be done, and we post a
good solid rant about it – and proceed to take a nap in the recliner.

Sometimes the best way to add meaning to your life is to get up out of that recliner
and do something meaningful. Thinking about it is not enough. For that matter,
ranting about it is not enough. Words are cheap. In this day of online posting and
blogs and emails, words are almost free. Better to actually invest in something of
value: Right action. Only you can determine what form of right action is yours to
perform. Your choice should match your abilities, resources and values, but
beyond that the sky is the limit.

When you are suspicious your life is not happy enough, one solution may be to see
if you think you truly give enough. The effort you make can not only improve the
world, but bring your life into alignment with your inner ideals. While happiness
is not always a matter of achieving moral harmony, unhappiness is frequently a
matter of feeling out of harmony with your own standards.

None of us want to be the people we ourselves despise. Doing what you think
wrong and failing to do what you think right is perhaps the most direct path to
unhappiness possible. The end result is shame, low-self-esteem, and worse.

What areas of your life do you feel are lacking. Pick one. Yes, only one to start;
the idea is not to overload yourself with Virtue Tasks. It is to simply find one area
of reality in which you wish you did more good. Have you had it with meat
production in our culture? This may be the time to put your money and your
volunteer time to good use. Do you believe in people helping people? You can start
giving micro-loans, watching and supporting others around the world. (Do not be
surprised when their efforts put you to shame and encourage you to make more of
your own life!) There are literally millions of ways to contribute to the world
around you: Hospital visits; helping handle dogs in shelters to maintain their health
and socialization; volunteering at your local library.

The joy to be found in giving is very real, for all it is often seen as a saccharine
cliché. It is not so much a cliché in truth, as a revelation that is never old. Few of
us can or should attempt to be the next Mother Theresa or Dalai Lama – but we

can, in our own way, at least serve as small lights, spreading happiness through the
world and receiving some of the shine back into our own lives – with interest.

Bringing it Together

Happiness is intrinsic to our idea of a good life: So intrinsic we have built the idea
of happiness into our religions, our governments, our philosophies, and all levels of
our art and literature. But because so many of us see happiness as a commodity to
be obtained, rather than a way of living and seeing, far too few ever enjoy the
happiness they desire. In the race for more toys, more success, more money, more
prestige, we lose sight of the fact that none of these things offers happiness.

Do not allow yourself to be one of the many who live without real happiness. With
discipline, and honesty you can shift your approach to happiness, working to make
yourself focus on meanings, actions, and integrity rather than pleasure and instant
gratification. As you move your life toward a more meaningful, focused, effective
standard, and learn to live the ideals you most believe in, you are likely to find
happiness far easier and more common in your life than it may have been
previously. A life of integrity and grace is, indeed, “something special.” As Jim
Volvano indicates, the happy life is the life fully experienced, and filled with
engagement with the world. There is only one way to happiness and that is to cease
worrying about things which are beyond the power of our will.

Happiness

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