Day 3: Happiness Is

I believe the case can be made that nobody leads a life of true happiness.

Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? Yes. Jefferson got that right. Happiness should be a pursuit, but it’s rarely more than that. It should be an aspiration, a goal to try and achieve, something to grab when it arrives so you can take in all you can when you have the opportunity. Happiness is achieved in fleeting moments, in golden periods when the entirety of whatever good surrounds us outweighs the darkness we carry.

Even in the stories of our culture, the types of conflicts that get in the way of complete happiness need to exist. If stories were nothing but characters walking around being happy at each other all the time, there wouldn’t be anyone changing or growing.

You can be happy in your job and still have days that beat the snot out of you. You can be happy about something good happening in your life, but eventually life continues moving on, and other experiences will bring on other emotional reactions. You can be happy with aspects of family life, but all parts of it? I’m completely suspicious of people who litter social media with choreographed photos of their families posing with wide and coordinated smiles meant to represent the nonstop steam of incidental precious moments that define their lives.

An esteemed philosopher of our times once wrote, “Life happens the way it does, and sometimes it sucks. But we keep living it anyway, because sometimes it doesn’t.” I’ve always taken that to mean that we each have our own burdens of negativity to bear and navigate through, ranging from the kind of pure and enveloping darkness that we even work to hide from ourselves to little more than pockets of anxiety or distracting irritations. However, that darkness is countered with the better times that come along, whether they’d be best described as inner peace, quiet contentment, exuberant joy, or whatever convenient definitions people might use to express their own versions of happiness.

We all experience the bad times and the low moments when anything about happiness feels trivial and distant. I’d argue we need those moments. Without them, we wouldn’t learn to fight for the things that are important to us, and maybe wouldn’t even be able to identify the things about life we truly value. How would anyone know how to thoroughly enjoy their moments of happiness without the comparison of more painful times?

If someone asks me if I’m capital-H Happy, I’ll usually respond with an innocuous “yes,” or “sure,” or “of course.” I probably don’t really mean it, though, unless they’re asking me at a moment right inside one of those short windows when I’m enjoying more things going my way than not.

It would usually be more truthful to say I’m content. Which often is no small thing.