The Lost Keys to Happiness

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