Happiness Page 10

Are we close to our children, to their activities and their feelings? In fact, are we close to anybody’s children — nieces, nephews, neighbors, needy kids from violent homes, angry kids from drug-ridden homes? If we are really “childless” two things happen: first, we have more to give to children in general than most people; second, children have more to give us than to most adults. Not only can we absorb it, but we are the ones who need it now, alone, in old age, with evenings free and the money and time to do for these children what no one else can spare.

  Most of all, the point is not children alone but the very act of being concerned about leaving the world a better place in the future than it is in the present. The art we create, the equipment we invent, the institutions we build, the ideas we promote, the populations we help are all gifts to the future that themselves stretch us to the limits of ourselves. And that makes us happy to have been alive.

  Are we still working on the relationship that gives us life, or are we at the point where we simply take it for granted or ignore it completely? To live without a spiritual friend is to live without a confidante, a person who really knows us, someone who can tell us when to stop drinking or stop crying or stop waiting or stop quitting life before it’s over.

  Are we working at something that brings out our best gifts, our deepest commitment, a special kind of excitement? The question of eternal learning is an important one where happiness is concerned. If we don’t keep putting fresh and evocative ideas into us, we make it impossible for anything new to come out. No wonder we’re too bored to be happy.

  Are we handling finances in such a way that we have neither anxiety about our present needs nor reckless disregard for the future? The issue here, too, is about a great deal more than money. It’s about whether we are dancing through life or plodding through life. Or to put it another way, the question is whether we have bought ourselves anything new for a while. On second thought, have we bought anything new for anyone else in life so that, without worrying about survival, they, too, can know what it means to live in a state of surprise? When we spend more than we have, we defer anxiety until tomorrow. When we refuse to spend anything outside the boundaries of survival, we refuse to live at all.

  Are we in touch with the spiritual dimension of life and the search for deeper meaning and a more cosmic vision of life?

  This is the question that probes whether or not we see beyond the immediate to its meaning, to its gift. It asks us to rejoice in a universe we do not understand precisely because we do not understand it, and so turn it over to the life behind the life we know. Then, we find ourselves walking among the stars and seeing a light in the future.

  To ignore any of these dimensions of life is to create a life that is less than fully alive. It opens a gap in the soul. It leaves us rudderless, insecure, and alone.

  * * *

  As important as the traits themselves, however, is the insight that must be drawn on the personal level from this kind of material: we are each works in process. We are each of us our own “happiness project.” If we are not happy, we must begin to ask ourselves what it is in ourselves that is lacking, that is yet to be developed in us, and then we must begin. Every stage of life will stress one or the other of the factors identified by the Oxford survey at various times, of course, but the point is that no life is really complete without having dealt with each of them.

  The problem with surveys is that they tell us where we are in comparison to the rest of the human race. What they fail to tell us is what it will take for us to become our own best selves.

  They tell us that happiness is not a mirage. Happiness is not a mosaic of advertisers’ temptations. Happiness is an exercise in bringing the best of ourselves to every challenge. It is a matter of internal development in the midst of external circumstances, not of external circumstances alone.

  I spent time in a polio hospital with men, women, and children who could barely breathe on their own, could not walk, could not dress themselves, could not lift their children or return to their jobs. But every day they met in the hall to run wheelchair races, to spend themselves to their limits, to reassert their independence, and to reclaim their ability to chart their own lives. It was a lesson in happiness for me.

  What did they have that enabled that kind of ongoing growth? The body of material is heaping up around us demanding to be seen. For all our sakes.

  Happiness:

  Putting the Pieces Together

  chapter 18

  Positivity

  Happiness, however well-geared the human being may be for it neurologically, is not a single cell structure of the human brain. It does not come packaged for us simply to tap into when we like, like insulin or bone marrow. Instead, happiness comes in the raw, meant to be shaped and nurtured. In the end, happiness turns out to be something we build for ourselves, one response, one moment at a time.

  Happiness is a composite made up of a cluster of attitudes. It is a person’s stained-glass insight into life, each color, each shape laboriously chosen, until, everything taken together, it becomes our characteristic way of looking at the world.

  It’s clear that happiness does not descend into the human psyche and soul a finished product. On the contrary. Study after study, we know now, substantiates the fact that this thing called “happiness” changes in us from one age to another. And most surprisingly of all, it is not the province of youth.

  Of all the things we might expect from youth — excitement, wild release, emotional excess, a sense of devil-may-care abandonment about life at an age when anything seems possible and everything seems desirable — happiness is not one of the primary factors of youth. The truth is, if social surveys and psychological studies are anywhere close to being right, the older we get, the happier we get. Happiness, it seems, grows on us. Delight takes us by surprise. Excitement invades us. But happiness, supreme contentment with life, is a learned commodity, and positivity is its anchor.

  At first thought, to say that the nucleus of happiness common to each of the major psychological studies on the subject is positivity may seem redundant. There’s something about it that sounds as if what we’re saying is that “happiness requires happiness.” But positivity — the ability to presume the potential good of any given situation — does not guarantee that we’ll like a thing. It simply opens the human heart to the possibility that what we do not now recognize as prelude to more may, nevertheless, be good for us. This thing we did not seek and do not necessarily want may well have the ability to grow us beyond our present self. It might even fill us with those unseen dimensions of life to which we have given absolutely no thought but which, the years prove, are well worth our having.

  My father died when I was three years old. That did not seem like a good thing to anyone then — or maybe ever. But one thing of which I’m sure: if that had not happened I would not be sitting where I am right now writing these words. And this part of my life is the best I’ve ever had.

  My young widowed mother could have whined her way through life and taught me to do the same. Instead, she walked through the pain to another life — and took me with her. She laughed and never looked back. She made no shrines to the past, no matter what happened to her on the road she never planned.

  Positivity says deep, deep within us that there is good in all things, so why not this and why not for me? What we never expected would happen to us, what we never even thought we’d like, brings us another whole layer of life.

  Taken alone, a thing may easily be dismissed as totally good or entirely bad. But taken in context, everything is larger than itself, nothing can be seen as simply good or bad. The elixir of it, time makes clear, does not lie only in the thing itself. It lies in us. The secret really resides in our own ability to look on all things in life as possible gains rather than as probable threats.

  Positivity is not naiveté. There is nothing unsophisticated or reckless, undiscriminating or uncritical
about positivity. On the contrary. It isn’t that positivity makes specious decisions about the unknown. Positivity simply refuses to make any judgment, for or against a thing, until there is enough experience to justify either. Positivity declines to give in to the kind of groundless fear that resists or refuses the unknown because it is unknown.

  Positivity is the child in us who jumps into a strange pool because she is confident that even if she won’t be able to swim all the way to the end of the pool she can certainly save herself by clinging to the side. Positivity is willingness, not foolishness.

  Sometimes it’s easier to understand the effects of positivity by looking at negativity, its opposite. Negativity is that posture of the human psyche that colors everything unknown either grey or mottled. Negativity looks at life with a jaundiced eye, a suspicious eye, a wary eye. There’s nothing wrong with it, perhaps, but there’s nothing right about it either.

  Life, negativity teaches, is to be questioned, kept at a distance, never fully embraced. It is an attitude of skepticism that clings like syrup to the soul. There is nothing in any given situation that I know to be dangerous — but it might be. There’s nothing wrong about it, but it could turn and bite us at any moment. It is caution to the point of exhaustion.

  Then I go through life, spending my time and my energy on worry, on anxiety, rather than on welcome, let alone anticipation.

  Negativity roots us in security for its own sake. It chooses safety over possibility. It discourages any attempt to make things even better than they are.

  The happy person, torn between the false sense of security that comes with negativity and the wonder of the possibilities of positivity, plays the odds. Since most things in life have been good, why not this one, the happy person says and tries it.

  Positivity makes a person glow in the dark. It makes tomorrow an adventure rather than a disaster. It makes life elastic, stretchable to the point where I find myself flush with life, experimenting with wonder.

  Positivity disposes a person to happiness. It makes us available to surprise. It gives us a head start on the future and makes us consumers of joy. No, positivity is not the be-all and end-all of happiness. Instead, positivity makes all the other dimensions of happiness possible. It is the ground out of which happiness can finally spring.

  chapter 19

  Extroversion

  It is one thing to cultivate a basic sense of positivity in life. But it is entirely another to move toward what positivity has to offer. Positivity resides in the new and the strange. It requires of us the courage it takes to run to meet the stranger on the road.

  Being willing to move into new places with new people is not simply a matter of being gregarious. In fact, though being gregarious may certainly broaden our contacts, it is not by itself certain to enhance our pursuit of happiness. Being inclined to be outgoing, to run with the “herd,” ironically, can create its own kind of boundaries. We move, yes, but, if truth were known, only really with our own kind. We have a strong social life, yes, but only if we know and already accept the ideas, the interests, and the social class in which we find ourselves.

  Real extroverts, however quiet they may seem socially, are alert to every difference and magnetized by it. What is different, what is unlike themselves, these spiritual extroverts seek out. They want to know — to really understand what is different from themselves. They seek out the opposite ideas in order to grow from them. They have avid interests in what is most unlike them as well as in what is most like them but more taken for granted than appreciated.

  Extroversion, then, is more than simply dislike of being alone. Extro-version is a dimension of soul, an attitude of mind, that seeks out what is new and foreign to my own world by any means whatsoever. This kind of extroversion refuses to cut itself off from differences, refuses to make prejudice a virtue. If I’m an extrovert, I pursue ideas and people outside of my natural circle, different from myself, in order to be more than I can possibly become alone.

  Introversion, defined in this case as withdrawal rather than thoughtfulness or the need to process data before engaging in public discussion of it, leads us to live within ourselves. Rumination — the tendency to constant self-examination, rather than the kind of serious reflection that leads us to examine what is new rather than to insulate ourselves from it — becomes the hallmark of those who fail to move beyond themselves.

  The problem is that the more we cut ourselves off from the world around us for the sake of security, the more we begin to tread the same old ground of life, like oxen on a waterwheel. It isn’t that we aren’t doing well whatever it is we do, but once we have exhausted the development of self that comes with stretching our limited lives and the territory that comes with it, the more we stall. The more stale life gets. The less life has to offer us because we have ceased offering it much at all. The “pursuit” of happiness becomes the expectation that happiness will come to us rather than that we might also need to go to it. At that point, the pursuit of happiness winds us in a dead end.

  Extroversion, on the other hand, catapults us into the unknown for the sheer sake of coming to know another whole part of life. Extroverts, by utter effort and the intention to stretch themselves beyond the waterwheel of their personal geography, make life an adventure to be lived rather than a raceway to be run round and round, over and over again, till our souls drop dead from the endless boredom of it.

  When we go out of ourselves to the world around us, we discover more of ourselves than we ever knew we had. We learn that we can develop skills we never needed to think about before. We learn to listen to other people, to draw from their wisdom, to be encouraged by their courage, to ourselves become more than we ever knew we could.

  Extroverts set out to discover the world. They do not wait for the rest of the world to come to them, and so they are far more likely to find the energy that comes with being swept along in life to places and people we would not otherwise even have imagined could exist.

  The extroversion that makes for happiness is the flicker of light within that leads us to go beyond our own tiny, paltry little worlds in order to live a treasure hunt for the rest of life somewhere else.

  It is the excitement that stirs in us when we see a picture of international volunteers building shelters for earthquake survivors in Haiti and say, “I’d love to do something like that.”

  It is the desire to know other cultures, other peoples, other races that takes us out of our comfort zone. It leads us to go to parties where everyone is instructed to bring someone with them who is from another race.

  It is a fire burning in us to go around the world.

  It is the rise of fascination in us when we begin to study another language for no good reason except that we’d like to know another way to stretch the boundaries of our world.

  It is the attempt to walk another, a new, road of life, whatever our age.

  It is a thirst for life that gives us the courage to risk ourselves to the unfamiliarity of the new.

  It is the confidence in the self that enables us to fail without being destroyed by the feeling that we are failures.

  Extroversion is not noisiness or gregariousness or recklessness or blind fearlessness. Extroversion is what leads us to try again, to try something new, to try something strange, to try until we get it right.

  It is that kind of determination to grow and that commitment to become more than our own small world demands of us in which the seeds of happiness lie — seeds of purpose and meaning and the kind of self-fulfillment that is about more than gilding the cave of the self.

  chapter 20

  Relatedness

  With all the bravado about the superiority of human rationality and speech, human history and technology, human conquests and conquerors, at the end of the day there is no other creature on the planet more vulnerable, more dependent than the human being. As top of the food chain, for instance, ecologi
sts tell us that we will be the first to go if pollution continues at its present rate. So much for being invincible. So much for human superiority.

  The truth is that to be human is to belong. We live inside a magnetic force that ties us to the rest of the world. “No man is an island,” the poet John Donne teaches us, as if being an isolated element of the human community were a matter of choice. But the fact is that we gravitate toward other people because we are simply incapable of living entirely alone, of being free of all other entanglements, of becoming perfectly self-sufficient for all our needs.

  Even in those cases where functioning physically independent of all other creatures might be remotely possible, it is not either intellectually or emotionally possible. The human species develops very slowly: nine months in the womb, at least twelve years before reaching sexual maturity and physical independence, years more before gaining the kind of emotional maturity it takes to make the judgments and choices that can even begin to assure any kind of life beyond the rudiments of sheer survival.

  Oh, we’ve always said it, of course. “The human being is a social creature” we learned somewhere early in the educational process. But it takes years to begin to understand the multiple levels of meaning that lend support to the statement. In fact, the implications of the statement are almost impenetrable. To be a “social creature” means that, as a species, we really don’t do anything alone. We can’t do anything alone. What the awareness of that insight implies for happiness, as well as for any other dimension of life, takes the whole concept of “individualism,” shakes it by the back of the neck and turns upside down everything we have ever taken for granted about our own invincibility, our jealously guarded “independence,” our barely disguised sense of “lordliness.”