Happy New Year Reader. A time of resolutions, promises, wishes, and so, I thought, the perfect moment to share some thoughts on happiness. I should start by saying that a New Year presents a convenient frame-work for a piece that I started writing eight months ago. Although I can’t be arsed with them anymore, I have nothing against New Year’s resolutions- it’s a new leaf for many, and making goals (whether they are attained or not is sort of beside the point) might be a nice way to assess what you’re aiming at within your year: ‘how we spend our days is of course how we spend our lives’ (Annie Dillard, The Writing Life). But, for transparency’s sake, I began writing this piece in May 2019, whizzing through Japan on a terrifyingly fast train, on holiday with my mum. That detail is relevant to the origins of this piece and not just me needlessly dropping in a far-flung holiday, I promise. The primary religions practised in Japan are Buddhism and Shintoism, and you could spend the rest of your natural-born life visiting the many temples and shrines dotted across the country (some of which are the most beautiful human-made sights I have ever seen, and which I still think about to get me peacefully to sleep at night). There’s a tradition in some Buddhist and Shinto shrines which invites the public to write and hang their deepest desires onto bits of wood (Ema), coloured balls, or similar, to express a wish, something to, or about the world, or for themselves. What struck me as I explored these wishes was the overwhelming desire to be happy. Written in as many languages as I can decipher (which, granted, isn’t very many, so there might well be a Western trend that I write about here, I’d well believe it):
“I wish for happiness”
“I pray to be happy”
“I wish for happiness for me, for my family, for my loved ones”
And now, an unlikely segue to Ken Dodd:
“Happiness, oh happiness, I’ve had my fair share of happiness”
Apparently, like many other song lyrics, I have been mis-hearing, mis-remembering, mis-understanding, or mis-something that line for my entire adult life. The actual line that I’ve artfully rearranged as above is:
“I thank the Lord that I’ve been blessed, with more than my share of happiness”
So apart from making it secular (more accessible to the masses, you’re welcome), my version works better syllabically and also (and perhaps more relevantly), I prefer the idea of a fair share. Because I’m bored of this apparent notion that we should all be striving for happiness, as if it’s a destination we can arrive at if we just try hard enough. More than boredom, I think it’s dangerous, because it suggests that your happiness is something totally within your control. I’m stepping on controversial ground here, but, I don’t think that we can always control our own happiness. I think things happen to us, events, losses, periods, hormones, illness, disappointments, crises, personal, within communities, on a national and international scale, which do, actually, happen to us. That we have to find a way through (or not, that’s also a choice). And that’s the point, in the face of those things, we have choice, but I think the choice is most often to sit with them and work out our relationship to those events, things, feelings, people, but I believe that the choice is not, I’m afraid, to happy. Of course, there are things I can do to help myself, but that’s not the same thing as having a monopoly on happiness. It’ll come and it’ll go, sometimes for concrete reasons and sometimes because… the tide does the same thing. Because I’m not in control of everything. That’s what a meritocratic society would have us believe- you make yourself who you are, but I cannot believe in that world, because then what - every misfortune that strikes a human is their just deserts? No. I call bullshit on that. That’s not how an interconnected society works. That’s why it takes a village to raise a human, from birth to death, because we are all “in and out of happiness” (thank you Bob Dylan), we are all in and out of luck. (Alain De Botton talks rather beautifully about this here.)
Happiness is not a fixed thing. It’s ephemeral. It’s an emotional state, like any other. It’ll come and it’ll go. And by fixing too greatly upon it, I think we do ourselves a disservice. I think we risk prioritising it over other areas of emotional experience. It’s one colour in a wheel of many. And what does happiness mean, beyond its own existence. I mean, it’s a pleasurable experience, absolutely, and of course, pleasure is terribly important. But I’ve used other feelings to drive me to other, as useful, things. Anger in the face of injustice, harnessed healthily, has a kind of power to it, a kind of fuel to do something, to act. Shame when we have done wrong- Trump could afford to feel a little more shame, no? Sadness when we have lost something, someone, because we have loved. Loneliness has called and in turn I have asked someone else for help. Jealousy might sometimes point out things we want but aren’t achieving. I’m not saying any of these feelings in their totality are a way to live. But smatters of them are useful. Not only that, they’re kind of beautiful. If not essential. Imagine saying to Vincent van Gogh, sure, paint using all the strokes you want, but I’m only giving you green. Get fucked, Vince would say. I want the full pallet, don’t cheat me of the fullness of expression. Oftentimes we need to feel and experience a whole range of things in order to progress, invent and move beyond stasis, and, for me, therein lies the point, progression, learning, expansion. I want my mind and body to experience and understand as much as it can, to know, feel, learn, witness, voice, hear the widest parameters of human experience. I think there’s a connection here to our relationship to change (which is probably a whole separate piece, but I’ll give it a wave here because I think it’s relevant). We live in a society (in the UK, anyway) obsessed with stasis. How do we pause ageing, how do we look like we did 5 years ago, 10 years ago, how do we as a nation go back to a better time, in the past, because things were better in the past- for who? Homosexuals, women, anyone who wasn’t white, disabled people? I fucking doubt it; things were better in the past for Jeremy Clarkson, sorry Jeremy, it’s time to share the pie. “Look, I just feel like you’ve changed”. GOOD. We should be changing, how terribly disappointing to live out our three score years and ten in the same state as that which we arrived in. How often is the idea of change welcomed in as something positive?
Each of us will get a share of happiness, some more than others, and each of us will find happiness in different places, people, will experience it in different ways. Some people find a thrill of happiness in a gram of white powder above a cistern at Fabric, good for them. Some people find it in the petting of a stranger’s cat. Some in eating out at a fancy restaurant, some in walking, some in reading, some in driving, some in doing things really fast, some in doing things really slow. Each to their own. Of course if there are things that are making you positively unhappy- a bad relationship, anti-social neighbours, a job that makes you want to claw your own eyes out, I’m not advocating that we don’t use (get acquainted with, and grow) the freedoms that we have to make those changes in the pursuit of happiness (although everyone’s freedoms are different, and that must be acknowledged, what’s possible for one person is not possible for another, we are not all equal (again, see Alain de Botton)). But don’t be fooled by the idea of a one move solution. This isn’t chess. Happiness more often than not sneaks up on me sideways- attending my best-friend’s midwife appointment and hearing the run-away train sound of her baby’s heart, safely housed in her body, for the first time. But the times that I have tried, really tried, to sit on happiness, to tie it down, corner-it, wrestle it to be mine, unsurprisingly in that melee of anxiety, tension and strain, it has not been forthcoming.
So I think that we all have a responsibility to re-frame this idea of happiness, not as an end-point, but as one of many things that we might experience in whatever time we have to attend this earth. And to value it in equal measure to any other thing that we might feel. To witness those feelings, and to know that the point is growth. It’s the growth that I am interested in, of which happiness is just a part. So, this year, rather than wish for happiness, I wish for my fair share, or maybe nothing at all, maybe I’d rather come at the whole thing without expectation and see what the winds throws at me.
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