happy — amy thomas

How do I feel right now? … Happy.

The voice of judgment says, “How could I be? Countless people are dying in wars and senseless acts of violence. Rivers of fire are incinerating forests, habitats, and homes. People I love are hurting.” Or the self-generating self-referential narrative begins to spit out thoughts like, “Wait. I’m tense, stressed, waiting to hear, and that elbow pain is still there… and, well, my life isn’t perfect yet, so I’m not really happy…” But then the voice of rational responsibility for my own mental well-being says, “Those are the voices of guilt and unworthiness, patterns of the default mode demiurge on autopilot. I feel happy, so I’m going to feel it, be with it, share it.”

Happiness studies in psychology, neuroscience, sociology, geography, and more have popularized and rationalized the pursuit of happiness as never before. The psychotherapy, science-of-well-being, and meditation communities, too, proffer many valuable lessons and teachings about what happiness is and isn’t and how to get more of it (sleep, exercise, put down your phone…). Now there are statistics to support the truism that money can’t buy happiness—within certain parameters—and the homiletic standby that happiness isn’t to be found outside but inside.

Leaving aside the question of whether there is an inside and an outside, the more interesting explorations are the deep and particular ones. What is happiness? What is the feeling of happy? What does the experience of being happy really consist of? What are we pursuing?

When I feel happy, there’s a positive affect, like joy, and feelings/sensations of warmth, lightness—as in a more permissive relationship with gravity—and a brightness, calm or the comfort of confidence, smiling, and general well-being. The stories that stream through the mind when we feel these feelings have the gist of flow. Everything is going well, things are rolling along, or, right now in this breeze and sparkle of damp grass and leaves is bliss. Time doesn’t press. I’ll see what happens…

And it doesn’t last. This is because nothing does, and because of the nature of happiness, which can be discovered in part by looking into its linguistic history.

The word happy is an adjectival form of hap; the addition of the -y suffix makes the word mean ‘characterized by or full of’ hap. Hap is luck, fortune, or chance, so originally and through the late nineteenth century, to be happy was to be lucky, “favored by fortune.” Even the latest definition to arise places it in this context: “having a feeling of great pleasure, or content of mind, arising from satisfaction with one’s circumstances or condition” (OED).

I think this history has hints for us about how to be happy. First, happiness isn’t a state that lasts because it’s a consequence of circumstance and chance. Think of the role of hap—luck—in all of the happy events of your life. Or, as the Talking Heads put it in “Once in a Lifetime”:

And you may find yourself in another part of the world
And you may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile
And you may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife
And you may ask yourself, “Well, how did I get here?”

Sure, there may have been some work, some effort, some earning along the way, but chance played an outsize role. Chance comes to us from Vulgar Latin “candentia, that which falls out, a term used in dice, from Latin cadere, to fall.”

Happiness is not a final achievement, a house on the coast. It’s also not a thing deserved, or even a thing. If happiness is a state of being full of hap, or characterized by chance, it also can’t be pursued. It’s what falls out of the dice cup in the game of life, so much of which is a gamble. Who or what shakes the cup? Without gods, we’re left with the chance and randomness we observe in the workings of the universe. You could just as likely be unhappy with what falls out, which points to the fact that it’s often our stance that decides.

Happiness is a moment of being happy with one’s circumstances—which are just the things around one’s stance, one’s attitude or perspective. When the circumstances of a rare breezeless morning with high cumulus clouds and the decision to walk across the bridge instead of around the lake presented me with this beautiful mirror, I felt happy.

Something I was first struck by in Gary Weber’s book, Happiness Beyond Thought, and then have heard from many other meditators, is that when they’re able to loosen their identification with self and ego (with thoughts), serendipitous and happy occurrences begin to abound. I don’t think this is because the universe sent them more coincidences. It’s because the attitude of non-identification with thoughts brings with it an approach to life that is less judgmental and controlling, and the recognition that things are just happening. It’s also because when you’re not lost in thought, not distracted by thinking from what’s happening, you notice more. There’s a reason Buddhism calls it “the veil of thought”; rather than being aware and open to what you’re experiencing, when you’re thinking, you’re busy judging, planning, considering how things could be better if different, regretting, hoping, fantasizing, worrying, and so on and on. Start paying attention to this and you’ll notice how often you don’t notice what is happening right in front of you.

To be unhappy is not to notice that sometimes what’s happening is an occasion to be happy.