Happiness Is A Choice

I’m a somewhat lugubrious guy. The state of the world has tended to leave me feeling on edge and uncertain. Even though I am daily impressed by the miraculousness of life, I have a certain doubt about my being happy in the face of so much suffering. I feel some heart-breaking complicity. None of these feelings are rational, but they never-the-less invade my equilibrium, and affect my pleasure about being here. So, you probably can imagine how uncertain I was, when I opened John Leland’s book entitled, Happiness Is A Choice You Make. I was prepared for another New Age bromide.

John had gripped my attention with his sub-title. He promised that he was    reporting the results of spending a year with the “oldest old.” Their voices mattered to me. His writing floored and chastened me. Now I can’t recommend this book enough. You see, I found wisdom in the natural creativity of elders, who were living with the usual difficulties of getting old. There is nothing panaceac about the lives of the six old (85 to 92 years of age) people he chronicled. Physical ailments, isolation, alienation, immobility, and the insult of cultural irrelevance haunted each of them. They were typical old people, who each had achieved happinessnot despite the difficulties of aging, but because of them.

As I read the variety of challenges they each faced, I came up against the hard lives of the old folks I know. Broken bodies, with wandering minds, hapless, unbalanced and falling — they created within themselves a way to enjoy what remained after the losses that came with life. That impressed and heartened me. They found in the present (so they didn’t have to remember anything) a way to enjoy whatever came their way. In the end, their love of life, and amazement before it, overcame the many challenges that living thrust upon each of them.

The book is well written, it presents a sober look into the lives of the oldest of us. But most importantly, it reveals the incredible happiness that comes from being human in the face of so much uncertainty and vulnerability. Happiness is a choice, a uniquely made attitude, derived from living intensely within the cauldron of life. Amazingly, what cripples and reduces us, also provides the little blessings, which make life surprisingly delicious.

There is no formula, no well-worn path, no way of predicting this non-rational joy, but it exists anyway. Having the good fortune to get old seems to help, but it is what one does with that piece of luck that seems to ensure the joyful outcome. Interestingly, the book reports that research on aged brains (through fMRI) shows that they are like the brains of life-long meditators. They have the benefit of a kind of natural mindfulness. Still, joy is not guaranteed. Happiness is idiosyncratic, it is something that is personal, existing in the relationship between any particular human heart and the deep mystery behind existence.

Knowing happiness is possible —and that it comes through Life and not despite it — is so freeing. It is not a condition of the world. Happiness is more durable than that. It lives in a place beyond the world, beyond the sadness of the way we treat each other, beyond even the way we treat the miracle of life itself. It is nestled within us, as a potential, unleashed by our own availability. Choosing it — is choosing it all — life and death, hardship and joy, evolution and the grace built into each moment.

Rapturous Difficulties

I have a friend, an older wiser man than I, who starts out things he says by making the following disclaimer,  “I don’t know jack shit about what I’m talking about.” Neither, do I. Brain-damage, however, lets me go into areas I know to little about, and where angels fear to tread.  This is one of them.

A few days ago a friend sent me a list of all the things he is grateful for. It was a beautiful list including things like; a long-term marriage, two incredible kids, a magnificent home. He had so much to be grateful for, that he actually worried that at age 50, he might have already lived a full life, and might not have more. It was amazing how rich with gratitude his life was, and how much he knew he benefited.

That evening, as I was going to sleep, I found myself thinking about him, and his list of gratitudes. I was surprised. To my astonishment, I found myself uneasy with his list. Something was missing. After a great deal of reflection, and some hours of wakefulness, I discovered what it was. There was nothing on his list that expressed gratitude for hardships.

The darkness created me. Suffering did more to teach me than anything. What I had no control of, and played no intentional part in, did more to shape me than most everything else. It was my life’s twists, the turns I didn’t expect, that tested me, and taught me my worth. These things too, I am grateful for, perhaps all the more, because they were the work of providence. I grew in ways I did not intend, but never-the-less benefited from.

It is this, the dark work of the invisible hands, the ones that trimmed my sails, and cast me into unknown oceans I would have never have knowingly sailed, that fiercely graced me — pulling me into a form unexpected — that I am humbled by, and most grateful for. I was thrust beyond myself, forced to deal with things that existed way beyond my control. 

These hardships, my stroke, the failed marriages, the potential I didn’t actualize, these did more to educate and sensitize me than any of my successes. It was a dark God, the cursed one— who interrupted my plans, asking what seemed impossible of me — that lead me home. My life, I have come to know, is not my life, it is Life’s life, and this is what I am most grateful for now: the difficulties that have shaped me.

I am more thoroughly human, because Life wrung the hubris out of me, making me more humble than I would have ever been if left to my own devices. I now walk (roll) with the weight of vulnerability and grace always haunting me, reminding me how quickly things can turn, and forcing me to recognize this small, but somehow exalted place I get to inhabit for a while.

The difficulty, as undesirable as it is, seems to make it all more real.  The hardships have graced me with a certain awareness of how “Lucky” I truly am. I wouldn’t have chosen what has brought out the best in me. But, I can be grateful, for that churlish wise one, loved me enough, to add hurt and disappointment to my depths.