Happiness

It's something I think about a lot. What makes one individual basically a "happy" person, and another individual - perhaps even one of similar circumstances, perhaps even one of better circumstances (speaking as objectively as possible), not?

Is it merely some accident of birth or genetics - you get a good roll of the dice, neurotransmittorily speaking, and so you're happy? Or, there's some kind of quiet gray stain that hangs out on Chromosome 12 or somewhere, and you get the tendency to see bleakness and destruction, like your Aunt Margaret or your grandfather?

Or is it learned? Does it come from parents who are resilient, who bounce back after bad stuff happens, who tell you things like, "As long as one person loves you - and I will always love you - life is good."?

I don't know. I tend to prefer not to analyze it too much, fearing sometimes that, just like dissecting a frog, trying to pin down the "secret" of happiness will kill it forever.

I'm pretty lucky in that, despite my occasional "black moods," I am basically - mostly - a pretty happy person. I usually don't get up in the morning dreading the day to come (well, unless I have a dentist appointment, but that's another matter). I can usually shrug off or laugh off life's little failures, or the miscommunications that happen. I don't really go in for conspiracy theories or thoughts of "they're out to get me."

I have a little sign hanging up in my office, to which I have at times silently pointed when colleagues or students come in all agitated that "so and so did this thing to me and they're doing it specifically to harm me and thwart my desires."

The sign says: "Never attribute to malice what stupidity can explain."

It's perhaps a bit more strongly worded than what I'd come up with if I were writing the quotation from scratch, but that's how I heard it. (I tend more to think, "Never attribute to malice what poor communication can explain." It seems that poor communication carries with it a multitude of problems).

I think also happiness comes in an ability to appreciate the small things. A good cup of tea, a well-prepared meal, a cleverly-crafted story, a well-performed waltz or scherzo or old bluegrass gospel tune...

I tend to think that our lives are (geologically and cosmologically speaking) so short, that somehow it is wrong not to stop and appreciate when there is something worth appreciating.

(The only line I remember from reading "The Color Purple" in high school? The one where one of the people says something like that she thinks it pisses God off if you see the color purple in a field somewhere and you don't notice it. Sometimes I think not enough people notice things like that).

I also think happiness probably involves not dwelling on bad things. (I do not know if happiness is a result of not dwelling on bad things, or if happiness allows people not to dwell on bad things.) I know that if you watch too much news - particularly the 24-hour-cycle all-news channels, you get a picture of the world that is bad and horrible and scary. All foods have the potential to kill us. There are people who are crazy and who are building bombs and who want to kill us. There are random sick freaks who abduct children or rape and murder women or who carjack and shoot men or whatever. There are ticking time bombs in your very body, things you can do nothing about, that will give you a horrible disease and then kill you. Things in Iraq are very very bad. Things in South America are very very bad. And on, and on.

And it gets kind of to be too much.

I am happier when I step off that merry go round - I don't mean being totally absent, totally clueless about the news - but not obsessing. Taking my news in a 30 minute dose early in the morning when I'm working out, and then switching over to music for the rest of the hour. And telling myself that I live in a pretty safe place, compared to the rest of the world. And I take pretty good care of my health, compared to a lot of people. And that there are people who are doing lots of good stuff, under the radar so to speak, all around the world, only they never get on the news.

It's not exactly like the old Serenity Prayer - I'm not ACCEPTING the things I cannot change, so much as I am accepting the fact that they mostly do not immediately and directly affect me, and so my concern about them - beyond, perhaps, praying for the safety of soldiers and sailors and Marines and airmen in Iraq, for example - will not measurably change the situation. And that it's much saner and better and probably more in the spirit that most of those men and women went overseas that I go about my life and be as happy as possible.

I think also, my work helps keep me happy. (Now, granted: I am at the beginning of a semester, when I am still all filled with hope and confidence. Talk to me again in about 10 weeks). But I'm also working on a research project and I'm just to the point where I can see what it will be when it's done, and I can also see what I have to do to get there. And I'm not on any kind of super-tight deadline, so I can pick it up and put it down at will - I can spend three or four hours working on it in an afternoon, and then pack it up and go home and read a book. (One of the reasons I didn't become a laboratory scientist was that running experiments until 2 am, or having to come in at 4 am and 10 am and 6 pm and 12 midnight to check on things, and being idle in between, was not something I wanted as part of my life.)

I do also enjoy teaching, as frustrated as some of the students can make me (and as I said, it's probably ultimately an IDEALISTIC sort of frustration: I look at them and go, "you could do so much more! you're smarter than you're acting! you need to reconsider your priorities; fifteen years from now it won't matter that you got the newest, most bling-ed out cell phone two days before your friends did"). I enjoy conveying knowledge. I enjoy coming up with good analogies, good ways of presenting things, and looking out over the class and seeing the "Oh - I get it now!" look on people's faces. I enjoy it when a student asks a question in class and it's clear to me he's trying to relate the current topic to something he already knows. I enjoy it when a student makes a comment that shows that she is pulling in prior knowledge and is thinking and is engaged.

But I also enjoy being out of work - I enjoy my free time. Again, I think it comes down to being able to appreciate simple things. Being out driving on a country road, when the weather is good, and I'm the only driver out there. Shopping (at least when the stores are not crowded full of rude people). Stopping somewhere for a drink or a piece of pie. Going to a bookstore.

(And perhaps it also strikes me here, that some of those pleasures - like going to a bookstore - are infrequent enough that they don't lose their luster through repetition. I live 1/2 hour [one way] from the nearest bookstore that is larger than my uni bookstore. So I get there perhaps once a month. It is always a joy and I always have a list of books I want to look for. I wonder if I would feel the same almost giddy delight to be on the way to the bookstore were it simply down the block from my office)

I also wonder if perhaps a capacity for gratitude is part of happiness. For example, coming home on a cold rainy night, closing my nice big heavy front door behind me and locking it, and being home. And saying, as I always do, "thank God for this house and thank God for being able to be home in it." And really meaning it - not saying it as a formulaic thing but genuinely feeling a thankfulness that I am out of the rain and in the warm and that I don't have to go out again and that I can take a warm shower and get into my jammies and make a cup of hot tea and read my mail and maybe work on a quilt or read a book.

Perhaps that gratitude is somehow tied up with an appreciation of small simple things. The stuff I really love - the stuff I want around me - is mostly not that expensive: good tea, good chocolate, good hard-milled soap with a nice scent, clean sheets on the bed, enough pillows, lots of books to read, a diversity of cds of music, my craft supplies, candles, good light to read by, kitchen gadgets I will actually use when I cook....Many of the things I take the most joy in, individually at least, are less than $20. Many of them less than $10.

You can have your iPod; I'm satisfied with my circa-1997 cd player and my cds of Dolly Parton. You can have your Wii or your Playstation or whatever; I'm happy with my books.

I'm not saying that that makes me better - don't get me wrong. But I think part of happiness comes with KNOWING the things that make you happy, and accepting that those are the things that are important to you, and not needing to buy things that other people have because you know that although those things may make those people happy, you are a different person, and different things make you happy.

I think another thing that makes me happy is having a little change, a little variation in my life. Too much of the same thing - even a good thing - gets kind of wearing.

Weekends make me happy but going back to work on Monday makes me happy.
Working hard on something makes me happy but rest also makes me happy.
Rain and snow and general crappy weather can make me happy, but sunshine after the crappy weather makes me happy.
A big crunchy green salad after having indulgent meals the day before makes me happy.

I was watching some PBS program the other night - I came into it late so I don't know exactly what it was about, but they had some "chick from the future" debating a man who was supposed to represent Aldous Huxley about the idea of humans interfacing (literally) with computers: putting in cybernetic things. The Huxley-actor was generally opposed...at one point he gave a long list of things (which was apparently from one of Huxley's real books or real essays, perhaps even Brave New World: it's been too long since I read it), listing all the "bad" things (like malaria and dyspepsia and such) and making the observation that he "wanted" those.

And while I'd not take it so far - personally, I think a technology that allows people who have lost their hearing to hear again, or allows people who were paralyzed to regain some motion, using computers, is a good thing, I'm not so sure I like the idea that some people implied - that we could "hook up to" everyone else in the world and know their thoughts and feelings and such. And that we could have electrodes and such implanted in our brain that would make us always and eternally happy (like a "soma" binge, I find myself wondering, remembering a bit of Brave New World from high school...). And I'm not sure I'd want that. While I would say there's a place for it - a way, perhaps, to allow profoundly depressed people to have some semblance of a normal life - I'd not do it myself. Because, I feel that without the occasional mood-of-darkness, the occasional day where everything goes badly, it would be difficult - maybe impossible - to recognize the good times. I tend to feel that bad times - a little shadow - is necessary to give depth to the good times. That having that "Christmas-morning" feeling 24/7 would eventually become so flat as to be taken for granted, that happiness fades when there's too much of it.

(And perhaps that's part of it - why I feel pretty happy now - because I WASN'T all that happy the end of last semester. It's kind of like - to use another example from my life - it's kind of like when I have a migraine. I get into bed, I turn off all the lights and get away from all the sounds I can. And I lie there and suffer. And I actually do sometimes ask myself, "Am I going to die?" [I have read that migraines, in all their neurological weirdness, can engender feelings of dread beyond those you'd expect for that level of pain.]. And eventually I fall asleep. When I wake up, usually the headache is gone. I'm a bit weak, I usually look pretty pale and am not entirely as steady on my feet as I was pre-migraine, but I'm elated. I'm alive! I don't hurt any more! I can read again! And I don't think I'd feel that simple excitement and appreciation so strongly had I not had an hour or so of agony.)

But anyway: to happiness. To being able to appreciate the small things, to being able to work with a will and a purpose and take satisfaction in that work.