Happiness - final

Happiness - Extra Credit


    When considering happiness it is important not to be distracted by it’s flashy cousin pleasure.  Pleasure is intense, but fleeting.  It’s dependent on exterior stimuli.  I feel pleasure when horseback riding, kayaking, and dancing.  That light giddy feeling lasts only slightly longer than the activity.

    Happiness is a calm satisfaction, a foundation that withstands the chaos of mundane life.  It can’t be created by a single pleasurable act.  Happiness can only be created over time from stuff more substantial than novel activities.  A sad person doesn’t become a happy person after one lighthearted afternoon.  Fortunately, happiness can’t be destroyed easily either.  Day to day disappointments and setbacks are just dust to be swept from the foundation of happiness.  The rubble of painful events may take more time to clear away so that happiness can be exposed again.  It is only an extraordinary event or incessant hammering that can crack the foundation that is true happiness.

        I have happiness.  It comes from my family and just as my family wasn’t created as a whole in one Genesis moment, I did not reach this state because of a single event.  My happiness comes from being at the center of a spreading ripple of family.  My happiness comes from knowing my center is a ripple of my parents’ center and their’s is a ripple of my grandparents’ center.  I reach back in time and forward to a future that is unknown and open, yet not empty or frightening.

    My happiness comes from being a woman in a series of women.

    The long and painful end of my mother’s life was an incessant hammering at the heart of the my foundation of happiness.  Years of saying goodbye to her, the center from which I rippled into my own center, tempered my happiness.  It was strengthened even as it was buried under spilled food and urine soaked sheets.  Caring for her, as she cared for her mother, reinforced my place as a part of an ever widening circle.  Now, a year later my happiness is reemerging.

    Hearing my daughter’s family laugh and giggle over breakfast across the street while I watered in the front yard brought that feeling of happiness back to the surface after my mother was gone.  Now that the giggling over breakfast happens thousands of miles away and the family across the street isn’t mine, I am sad, but not less happy.  Seeing my younger daughter bake using her grandmother’s recipes reinforces that feeling of happiness that comes from connection.  Hearing my son and the young men and women he has known since childhood deep in philosophical debates as the night stretches toward dawn brings that feeling.  Standing with my husband in our yard contemplating the spreading ripples of our life together is that feeling of calm satisfaction that is happiness.  During these passive acts of observing, my happiness is most evident.

    Knowing the source of my happiness does not give me a road map to future happiness.  It isn’t that simple, there is no magic A to B correspondence.  Quitting my job so I can horseback ride and kayak will not increase my happiness.  I need to stay involved and connected to those who are important to me, and in addition welcome and connect to those who are important to them.  I have to embrace small moments as well as huge events.  I have to be ready to forgive and ask forgiveness.  I have to listen and share.  It is time invested in relationships that has repaid me with happiness.  I am happy.