What does it mean to have a happy new year?
Back when everything in my life seemed more or less fine, I assumed everything was more or less fine in the lives of the people around me. After all, in a society where most of us can get food when we’re hungry and drink when we’re dry, warmth when it’s cold and coolness when it’s hot, what is there to complain about?
Those who aren’t happy, I decided, are insufficiently appreciative.
It was only when life started knocking me around a little that I became aware that just about everyone I knew was coping with something hard. Even when food, water and shelter are givens, the sense of well-being that we derive from some combination of health, satisfying relationships and satisfying activity, is not.
We who are middle-aged, for example, are simultaneously watching our children struggle with the transition from adolescence to adulthood and our parents age and die. Back trouble is rampant among us. Cancers and heart conditions are surfacing. Marriages are fraying. We fret that our skills will become obsolete before we’re ready to retire and that we won’t have enough money to live on when we do retire. We dread an old age reduced to endless rounds of medical appointments, nagging aches and pains, inactivity, loneliness and boredom.
Needless to say, our children and our parents have troubles of their own. When I saw this headline in The New York Times the other day — “On Human Happiness, and Why It’s So Hard to Find” — I thought, well duh! Life’s tough. (The Times story was about a PBS series called “This Emotional Life” that aired this week.)
Much of what I know about the nature of happiness I have learned from my daughter Rosa. When she was in high school the question, “How was school today?” had no meaning for her. Or rather, it had too much meaning. To answer it truthfully she would have to say something like, it was good for the first seven minutes of French class, then the next 20 minutes were kind of boring, then I didn’t feel that great the rest of the morning because I hadn’t eaten breakfast, then eating lunch made me happy, but then I felt tired, then I really enjoyed part of my history class…and so on.
Happiness, in other words, comes and goes and often co-varies with one’s physical state: An uncomfortable person is usually a grumpy person. When I think of being happy I think of moments. Moments when the light is particularly beautiful or the air is particularly delicious on my skin. Moments when I really hear and really see, when I really connect with the people I am with. The beauty of these moments is that you don’t have to be on a white sand beach to have them. They can happen anywhere.
Or imagine this: It is morning. You and the person you love are lying side by side. The light is pearly. A breeze ruffles the curtains. There is no noise. You are comfortable and calm: You feel like you are floating. You do not want to move and you do not have to. You can make it last.
And then you can’t. Everything changes: light, temperature, sound. The body wants something else – food, a different position, a bathroom. You feel you ought to do something, go somewhere. The spell breaks. Your floating body returns to earth. You get up.
Once we’ve figured out what brings us the possibility of momentary happiness (Did I put that modestly enough?) – afterglow mornings, lively evenings with friends, lovely walks in the woods, or whatever brings you bliss, joy, contentment – we owe it to ourselves to put ourselves in those situations as often as possible. There’s a good new year’s resolution for you.
But even in a good year, happy moments are going to be as sporadic as they were during a typical day in Rosa’s life as a high school student. In that sense, the pursuit of happiness is bound to make us unhappy.
So maybe happiness isn’t quite what we’re after. We probably spend most of our time feeling neither happy nor sad, but just kind of OK. In the OK state (and I don’t mean Oklahoma) nothing especially memorable or interesting is happening. Life feels like it’s drifting by – which is kind of scary, given the brevity of our sojourn here on planet earth.
In contrast, there’s how we feel when we or someone we care about is going through a crisis. We become hyper-aware, hyper-engaged. We become more attuned, not only to our own emotional states and those of the people around us, but to beauty in nature, in music, in movies, in books. For better or worse, we learn a lot at such times. It’s all oddly exhilarating. As one of the experts interviewed on “This Emotional Life” puts it: “The opposite of depression isn’t happiness; it’s vitality.”
Certainly, few of us want to suffer or see others suffer just so we can feel alive. But as the senses dull and the routines deaden, it’s little wonder that we crave intensity. The challenge is to find a way to experience it without lurching from crisis to crisis.
Russell Frank is always happy to hear from you. Write to rfrank@psu.edu.
