The following piece was initiated as a result of a comment by Ginny about "The Law" (by Franz Kafka) in my last blog post about wisdom. I interpret the doorkeeper of "The Law" as being each of us, and we must go through the door ourselves individually and seek our destiny, including happiness, rather than waiting for it to come to us.
Happiness Through Language
The Choice of Happiness
A common concept of "happiness" seems to imply that happiness happens to a person; e.g., we achieve happiness, or something will cause us to be happy: such as love, a car, a house, etc. Even our American forefathers talked about the "pursuit" of happiness in the Declaration of Independence. The use of "pursuit" tends to externalize the source of happiness from us. Happiness for many in our American culture is a vague promise of euphoria that will be felt if a person reaches his self-made, culturally-inspired goals. Of course, for some, the pursuit is internal and spiritual.
Happiness is often enjoyed briefly and vicariously in daydreams and fantasies only, because we sometimes set impossible goals for our happiness. Or, our goals are raised instantaneously and coincidentally with reaching the previous goals.
If we change the concept of happiness to reflect that happiness is our own creation, far more of us would realize that we must create it ourselves, or choose to be happy. We could set our own criteria for happiness to be exactly what exists in our lives at this moment and be happy whenever we choose, just by changing our language (or the concept of the word "happiness"). Many survivors of the Nazi concentration death camps attribute their ability to control their happiness and hope, even under the most horrid and cruel conditions, to their survival.
An example of our ability to create a feeling of happiness within ourselves without any real-time cause is: the warm feeling of happiness we are able to experience by remembering an event that truly brought us the original happy moments - a birth, a wedding, a reunion, a secret meeting, perhaps an as-yet-unrealized dream or fantasy. We experience the happy joy even though it was a recreation of the original joy, or the vicarious pleasure of a dream.
The happy lightness we create within ourselves with our thoughts is produced entirely by us internally; there is no goal-oriented, conditional happiness involved. It is spontaneous, yet reproducible. It is a self-generated happiness. Happiness does indeed dwell within us, and we can release it from within ourselves by choice; it is not resident outside of us. Our ability to self-create happiness demonstrates that we are the authors of our own happiness.
Like beauty that is in the eyes of the beholder, I believe happiness radiates from our soul and is reflected in our countenance and demeanor. We all have different criteria for happiness, but some feel that we have a common glow when happy. Tolstoy's opening lines of Anna Karenina recognize the commonality of happiness: "Happy families are all alike. Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." Tolstoy believed happiness has a single face; unhappiness has an infinite number of faces
This view of happiness does not suggest that we should "choose" happiness all the time. Certainly the vicissitudes of human experience, especially the tragic experiences, such as the loss of a loved one or the loss of health or the rupture of a personal relationship, make happiness inappropriate at certain times. Sadness and grief have appropriate times, but the choice to end these states of mind by substituting happiness at its appropriate time is ours. And of course, mental illness, such as depression, could be a major obstacle to choosing happiness.
The realization that happiness is our own creation is a powerful thought. In fact, the power is awesome, but it is also frightening, because it is seemingly too simple and forces this responsibility on us. To paraphrase Abraham Lincoln, "I reckon people are about as happy as they make up their minds to be."
