It's not about being right. It's not about being able to say I told you so. It's not about the state of the weather. It's not about everything going your way. It's not about being in luck. It's not about relationships always working out. It's not about understanding quantum physics. It's not about people recognizing you on the street and waving. It's not about your ideal weight. It's not about your father's or your mother's approval. It's not about material security—cash or silver, or the value of your portfolio, or the appraised value of your home. It's not about having the right skills-set for the era. It's not about the laundry being done. It's not about owning beautiful, unbroken things. It's not about being voted most likely to succeed, or following that up with actual success. It's not about your underwear. It's not about the stain on the tablecloth.
A lot of what people call the blessings of life are nice to have. And when these come to you, it's appropriate to be grateful. It makes sense to smile when they arrive. But they're extras. You'll take them when they come. You'd be a fool not to. But do you need them for happiness? No.
It's not about a colorful and convincing resume. It's not about the temperature of the house in winter. It's not about knowing for sure if there is or isn't a God. Again, it's not about being right. No, it's definitely not about being right.
So what is the stuff then? What's happiness?
Well one thing's for sure it's experienced in the now only. It's receptivity now. It's generosity now. It's allowing someone else's pain to touch you now. It's that red and yellow leaf falling with such grace and unconcern and beauty now. It's the touch of reassurance from your friend right now. It's listening to that music right now, not just on the surface, but as deep down as the music goes. Oh gosh yes, it's about depths. It's about paying attention to how deep down and how far back you yourself go—the wisdom that you've accumulated over the years, the experiences you've had. It's about respecting your own mind. It's about reverence for your own life and for the lives of all living things.
It's about trying. It's about taking the risk. It's about saying yes, but often enough it's also about saying no. It's about accepting other people's answers (yes or no) with equanimity and poise. It's about living in your body. It's about taking the time. It's about praying if it's in you to pray. It's about crying if it's in you to cry. It's about allowing your life to contradict itself sometimes. It's about letting yourself lie back on this or that paradox of existence, the way that you can float on water if you just lie back. It's about a golden pear in the hand, ripe and curved and full of an understood sweetness. It's about biting in now and tasting. It's about the thought that the kingdom of heaven is something that can be known now, like that pear; and by the way all the wisest people who have ever lived seem to agree on that, East or West.
Happiness is about traveling between your heart and anothers. Your mind and another's. Your soul and another's. Your well-being and another's. It's about dying into the distances between you. According to the poet William Blake, it's about dying many little deaths each day for the sake of another.
In general, your happiness shouldn't depend on the attitude of others toward you. It shouldn't depend on the vagaries of fate. If it does, then your happiness is poorly grounded. Its foundation is inadequate. Even cracked.
In general, happiness is probably what you're feeling when you're most free of the question of happiness and how to achieve it. It's probably something that can't really be achieved at all.
And yet it's not wholly a gift either. It requires a certain consciously chosen attitude of inner attenuation. You aim yourself like an antenna to receive it. Or it's like the fisherman throwing the fly in just the right place in the stream where the fishes are going to be biting, but without really trying either, just knowing, just doing.
Some people will say happiness is a shallow thing to pursue, or too vague in definition to care about. But I say it's maybe neither shallow nor deep, and that we know it well enough when we see it, and that yes, it has something to say about us. Let's not call it a destination. Let's say it's more like a measure of your speed. Or your direction of travel. Let's say that it's just one means of many to give you a read on how you're proceeding. Where you are in life. What you're about. Where you ought to be going.
Certainly it is not everything, happiness. It may be in fact that our expertise in the field of feeling grief is every bit as vital to our depth as human beings.
HB
Back when I was in college (now some twenty five years ago) it was a running joke with my roommate how often I found myself frantically searching my side of the room for my keys, or how often I'd come running back into the room some five minutes after leaving for class, having realized I had left my keys behind. I accepted the jibes, at least after I found the truant keys, but to my memory, never once in all my four years as a student--never once!--did I sit down to consider just what such a habit of misplacement and forgetfulness might mean. About the unwarranted busyness of my hours. About the unquiet in my mind.
I mark it down as an improvement that these days I lose track of my keys only rarely. Nevertheless, it does happen; and when it does, I still find myself pretty dependably reluctant to draw any conclusions about the event beyond the moment. “General?” I say. “Say anything general about my life? No no, it was just a temporary lapse; just gravity acting at the wrong time, making me drop them. It was that stupid local advertising flyer okay? I laid it down over my key ring and fob, which made me accidentally lose sight of them!” And of course there's no need to fixate on literal keys alone. Missed appointments are lost keys. Fits of temper are lost keys. Tears of stress are lost keys.
There is a hermetic proverb that declares that the everyday realities of our daily life mirror and refer to a larger macrocosmic order. The proverb goes: “As above, so below.” And we might just as easily alter the proverb and say, “As in your outer life, so within.” “Look at your life,” we ought to say to ourselves more often. “Take its events into your heart for purposes of reflection and diagnosis." When stress rules our lives; when schedules are so crowded they feel like ferries about to capsize; when necessary objects such as keys go AWOL on a regular basis--what does all this suggest about our inner lives? A lack of the food for reflection perhaps? A disconnection from the sources of sanity? A poorly meditated set of values? A dearth of music, deeply heard, or of other forms of beauty?
Just the other day, I ran across a sixteenth century poem by Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, called “The Means to attain Happy Life:” which I think might just as easily be called “The Keys to the Happy Life,” or even “The Lost Keys to the Happy Life.” It begins:
Martial, the things that do attain
The happy life be these, I find:
The richesse left, not got with pain,
The fruitful ground, the quiet mind....
I like it that the poem is addressed to someone called “Martial,” which of course, suggests someone used to fighting. Someone given to solving trouble with discipline, organization, order, and machines that multiply your strength. Is Martial the sort of person we're trying to be--as soldiers of the schedule? As the prize-fighters of career ambition? As faceless troopers marching to the beat of universal consumption and a narrowly defined prosperity?
Yet look at the advice the poem offers! “Don't work so hard for happiness,” it says, “Don't try to force it. Trust to the fruitful ground. To the quiet mind. Trust the riches that come to you free more than the riches that cost so much in spirit to attain."
The poem runs beautifully on:
The equal friend, no grudge, no strife.
No charge of rule, nor governance,
Without disease, the healthful life,
The household of continuance.
The mean diet, no delicate fare;
True wisdom join'd with simpleness;
The night discharged of all care,
Where wine the wit may not oppress.
The faithful wife, without debate;
Such sleeps as may beguile the night:
Contented with thine own estate
Ne wish for death, ne fear his might.
I wont' try to paraphrase it all. It's clear enough isn't it, that here was a man who, despite the privileges that might have blinded him, (privileges, let's admit it, of wealth and rank that he enjoyed as an earl), understood that true happiness depends not so much on what one can count and control, but on gifts beyond the individual's immediate power to invoke or even precisely define--friendship, human love, intimate social interaction, the ability of food to nourish us, a decent night's rest: none of these, NONE, can be forced into being, or bought, but rather must be accepted as gifts when they arrive, and then tended like a pleasant fire within a general atmosphere of generosity, gratefulness, freedom, common sense, conviviality, and trust.
Now. If such gifts as Henry Howard enumerates truly are the keys to the happy life, how have we lost them?
- We have lost them by lack of reflection.
- We have lost them by asking too much of ourselves in some dimensions, and not enough in others.
- We have lost them by asking too much of the planet.
- We have lost them by forgetting the word "enough."
- We have lost them by taking for our own exclusive use what ought in fairness to belong to others as well.
- We have lost them.
- We have lost them by losing track in our vocations of what makes us personally passionate. We have followed money instead of our hearts.
- We have lost them by neglecting our families.
- We have lost them in the noise and the glare of electronic distraction.
- We have lost them.
- We have lost them by thinking of time as a means to an end (such as making money) and not as pure gift.
- We have lost them by neglecting to cultivate our inner lives with the beauty of art and with the ordinary warmth of the outdoor sun.
- We have lost them in the belief that everything that we humans make for ourselves at great expense is an improvement on what nature gives us for free.
- We have lost them in the foolish belief that power trumps beauty. That speed trumps meditation. That efficiency trumps happiness.
- We have lost them.
Time to consider how to get them back. Time to seek a different way.
HB
