Happiness

A friend of mine said today that happiness is not a "long-term phase," but transient, experienced only fleetingly during special and privileged moments, and that it is something one has to work hard and deliberately to attain. This has me thinking. I guess everyone is different in the quantity and quality of happiness they experience and why they experience it. What contributes to our happiness is probably very different from one person to the next.

I can't really relate to my friend's experience of being mostly "not happy.". I find happiness to be generally abiding, even when it is temporarily engulfed by passing anxiety, disappointment, sadness, anger, grief, or irritation. Perhaps there is some sort of spiritual underpinning to this. While I don't really believe in a traditional God (or, at least, I'm completely theologically confused,) I like to believe there is some force of benevolence in the universe with which I occasionally connect. I get all the arguments about belief in God being an evolutionary construct and that such belief causes us to create our own God or gods to meet our psychological needs for comfort, relevance, and eternal life, but I still truly believe there is "something" out there and that, sappy and Pollyanna-ish as it sounds, it is a concentrated purity of goodness and love.

I was very lucky to have experienced a "golden" five-year period in my life when I was in my twenties, and perhaps that set me on a happy trajectory. It was a fairy-tale period of adventure and exhiliration. I moved to Europe and felt tremendous, wide-eyed excitement at all that was so new and different. There was so much to learn, experience, and savor, not only through travel, but also through contact with wonderful new cultures that were very much more humane, tolerant, and compassionate than what I had left behind. I guess I was very unsophisticated when I arrived in Europe, but every new tourist attraction was a tremendous thrill. I started my own company, worked in Germany and Switzerland, and fell in love with a kind and wonderful man. My beloved aunt and uncle gifted me a magical wedding at their 15th century home in England. I am still in disbelief at their generosity. My career, rather to my astonishment, blossomed and bloomed. The gift of those "golden years" of incredible good fortune has colored my life with hope and delight ever since.

There was happiness thereafter ... a move to California, my four wonderful children who are the loves of my life, a move to Colorado, some great friends, trips, pets, hobbies, classes, books ... And while life has not always been easy since those days, it has been satisfying and fulfilling. Before that golden period, I had some wretched experiences and felt deep unhappiness on many occasions, but even then, I still believed I would be able to escape and move on to brighter horizons. I was also blessed to have some amazing people come into my life. I think books were another source of great joy to me. They provided alternate worlds where anything was possible. And nature was always a gift. Thinking of the forests, misty beach scenes, dolphins, seagulls, coral reefs, snowstorms, lakes, rivers, flowers, prairies, trees, mountains, and thunderstorms I have seen makes me happy.

So I don't really know where happiness comes from or why some of us are blessed with it and some not. I know I have had incredible injections of good luck at certain times in my life, and I will be forever grateful for those. To feel one has been successful, at least for part of one's life, is a great gift. In my case, I think I probably have a congenital disposition to be happy. There is so much I just, for no particular reason, enjoy. I love looking out the window at the pine trees outside. I love seeing squirrels. I love reading. I love the sky. I love my kids. I love watching my Great Courses videos. I even enjoy complaining (I find humor in it.) I guess I have pretty low standards for finding things to be happy about, and I'm happy about that.