THE ONE SURE WAY TO HAPPINESS
by June Callwood
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HAPPINESS IS the rarest, most prized and most misunderstood state of man. Actually, lasting happiness depends on how much maturity a man has been able to assemble--some of it derived from being desperately unhappy. It is a consequence of at least a moderate amount of education or training, because happiness requires a decently stocked mind. It is bound up with the ability to work, and to be readily interested in the world around you. It also is part of an unembarrassed appreciation of leisure and of solitude.
The relationship between happiness and maturity defeats the
rationalization of many aging adults--that happiness is youth and naturally diminishes with time. Happy people can be any age, past 20. Children are rarely happy;they have "flights" of joy,
but their helplessness in a restrictive adult world keeps them close to despondency. Until their personalities stabilize, a process generally completed after the age of 35, they are likely to be wretched with self-doubts and dismay at their inner muddle.
Younger adults may describe themselves as "happy";it's a serviceable word to protect privacy. But many of them are frantic at the acceleration of time they are beginning to feel. They can sense the years wheeling by without any substantial or satisfying accomplishment. Grieving over their mistakes and wrong choices, they don paper hats for laughs, give anxious parties, drink too much, talk too much and say too little. They see old age as a catastrophe, a final bad joke on the false dream of being happy.
Yet all over the world, men and women, most of them in their 30s, are turning a corner that they didn't see, and stand transfixed by the miracle of finding themselves happy. Nothing has changed in the room, in the family;nothing is different--but everything seems so. The personality has put together enough experience to make sane judgments, enough vitality to love, a few fragments of clarity and courage, and a great deal of self- appraisal. There is a soundless 'click', and a steady state
of happiness ensues.
True happiness is unmistakable. One woman compared it with the
unequivocal quality of a genuine labor pain. "When you're carrying your first baby," she explained, "you keep wondering what a labor pain is like. Every time you have a cramp or twinge
you wonder if this is it. Then eventually you have a whooper of a labor pain. There is no question in your mind about it;you "know" that this positively is the real thing. Well, becoming happy is just the same. You think you are, from time to time in your life, but when it really arrives you recognize it immediately."
No one is born happy. "Happiness is not," says psychoanalyst Erich Fromm, "a gift of the gods." It is an achievement, brought about by inner productiveness. People succeed at being happy in the same way they succeed at loving, by building a liking for themselves for true reasons. Hollow people, lacking any conviction of their worth and without self- respect, have nothing to give--a profoundly unhappy state. They must connive to secure love and admiration for themselves, and they can't depend on keeping it.
Unhappy people rarely blame themselves for their condition. Their jobs are at fault, or their marriages, or the vileness of parents, or the meanness of fate. The real cause is the incoherency of their lives. Sterile and confused, they have no warmth to give, in work, play or love. They wait in apathy for a visit from the fairy godmother, and in the meantime try to distract their attention from the abyss of barrenness and
boredom within them. The furthest notion from their minds is to improve their lot by tackling some self-reconstruction.
"The happiest person," said Timothy Dwight, when he was president
of Yale University, "is the person who thinks the most interesting thoughts." One of the world's most respected psychologists, William McDougall, had a parallel comment:"The richer, the more highly developed, the more completely unified o integrated is the personality, the more capable it is of sustained happiness, in spite of intercurrent pains of all sorts." Aristotle believed that happiness was to be found in use of the intellect, an occupation characterized by self- sufficiency, unweariedness and capacity for rest. The self- sufficiency theme was echoed with a mathematician's spareness by Benedict Spinoza, who wrote 300 years ago, "Happiness consists
in this:that man can preserve his own being."
Nothing on earth renders happiness less approachable than trying to find it. Historian Will Durant described how he looked for happiness in knowledge, and found only disillusionment. He then sought happiness in travel, and found weariness;in wealth, and found discord and worry. He looked for happiness in his writing and was only fatigued. One day he saw a woman waiting in a tiny car with a sleeping child in her arms. A man descended from a train and came over and gently kissed the woman and then the
baby, very softly so as not to waken him. The family drove off and left Durant with a stunning realization of the real nature of happiness. He relaxed and discovered that "every normal function
of life holds some delight."
When Adm. Richard E. Byrd believed himself to be dying in the ice
of the Ross Barrier, he wrote some thoughts on happiness. "I realized I had failed to see that the simple, homely, unpretentious things of life are the most important. When a man achieves a fair measure of harmony within himself and his family circle, he achieves peace. At the end only two things really matter to a man, regardless of who he is; the affection and understanding of his family."
One American writer announced that he had been a happy man every day of his adult life. Of course, he admitted, there had been days when he was jobless and hungry, days of grief, days of nausea and illness. But on each one of them he had been able to contact the deepest part of himself which was operating steadily, soundly and happily. A permeating, permanent sate of
happiness is rare--but the world abounds in people who are achieving ever- larger fragments of it.
A psychologist who questioned 500 young men to determine their degree of happiness made the not-unexpected discovery that happiness and health generally go together. Happy people tend
to be ill less often, recover more quickly, even seem to have bones and tissue that heal better. And happy people often seem to age more slowly. They have better color, glossier skins, more erect carriage than their contemporaries who suffer the graying atrophy of depression and anxiety. "Increased circulation brightens the eye," said Darwin;"color rises, lively ideas pass rapidly through the mind, affections are warmed."
Oddly, laughter has little or no relationship to the state of happiness. Calm, serene happiness rarely laughs or cries. It has too much stability to need the tools of the tense. It is embodied in the private conquest of self-dislike and the honesty of self-definition.
A Frenchman once said that wise men are happy with trifles but nothing pleases fools. All wise men, however, have been fools. There is a trick to their conversion:
"Count your blessings"--only numskulls are tormented by regrets and recriminations.
"Pause to enjoy"--Goethe, a craftsman at happiness, explained that happiness is not transitory joy but a longevity of secret power.
"Sharpen your wits when you observe man and nature"--because
understanding the unique strength and beauty within all living things is the heart of happiness.
"Never fear to use yourself up"--the great elixir of life, according to George Bernard Shaw, is to be thoroughly worn out before being discarded on the scrap heap--"a force of nature, instead of a feverish, selfish clod of ailments and grievances."
"Never delay"--unhappiness is nurtured by the habit of putting off living until some fictional future day.
Fromm proclaimed, "Happiness is proof of partial or total success in the art of living." There are few total successes but it is not an impossible art. Never, ever, impossible.(#)
SIMPLIFY! SIMPLIFY! by Thoreau
GOING HOME by Hamill
THE ART OF PAYING A COMPLIMENT by Adams
PUT YOUR BEST VOICE FORWARD by Price
THAT VITAL SPARK--HOPE by Whitman
BUT WHAT USE IS IT? by Asimov
NO WONDER by Sangster
MAKE AN APPOINTMENT WITH YOURSELF by Finkel
HEARING IS A WAY OF TOUCHING by Lagemann
THE SPECIAL JOY OF SUPER-SLOW READING by Piddington
YOU'RE SMARTER THAN YOU THINK by Lynch
HOW TO SELL AN IDEA by Wheeler
I'M A COMPULSIVE LIST-MAKER by Bluestone
HOW TO RELAX by Kennedy
TOO MUCH SEX, TOO LITTLE JOY by May
HOW TO BE A BETTER PARENT by Homan
FIVE WAYS TO IMPROVE YOUR LUCK by Gunther
THERE IS SAFE WAY TO DRINK by Chafetz
TAKE MUSIC INSTEAD OF A MILTOWN by Marek
VIEW FEATURE RECIPE
ENTER CUISINE CORNER
Under construction but accessible too.
(Recommended)
ENTER CHILDREN'S ROOM
Specially adapted short stories for young people of all ages, from all over the world, by Amy Friedman.
(Very good fables.)
ASCEND TO THIRD FLOOR
Heavy stuff that were lifted by several decades to its present location, ZDS' third floor.
You can't find writers who can still keep their distance from their topics like these two.
(Highly recommended for the philosophical. Not too easy to digest in one sitting. Anyway, it's better than tons of history and anthropology books.)
DESCEND TO FIRST FLOOR
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