There’s a lot of talk lately about happiness, and I personally have nothing against it. At the behest of a good friend in our “Happy Bookers” Book Club, I read and enjoyed The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin, after which I began to wonder exactly what said friend was trying to tell me. I admit that I am prone to seriousness, but what I lack in effusive emotion, I feel I make up for in dry wit. Anyway, I was fumbling my way through the grocery store checkout not long ago and was confronted with Oprah’s smiling image on yet another tabloid front. From a 24-point headline, she advised me and anyone else in passing that if we would invest the time to explore and identify just what makes us happy, we’d be on our way to bliss.
Not that I, who do not have a multi-media empire, a television show, or even my own magazine, am in a position to question Oprah, but is it really that hard to identify things that make us happy? Speaking as a garden variety human being, I have easily come up with a happiness list, which includes: all my wants and needs met, no problems with which to deal, and of course, to be universally loved and admired. Oh, let’s add, writing a best-seller, never waiting in traffic or waiting in line, never needing the services of a dentist, and just for kicks, I would like to be able to eat like a teenage boy and maintain a size 5 for life. Honestly, there are times I would be willing to give all that up and settle for a world without any television shows featuring Kardashians, survivors, professional wrestlers, bachelors living below deck on a yacht, impractical (rude) jokers and news commentary from either side of the political divide. I think we’d all be well on our way to happiness right there.
I know Oprah means well, but I admit it makes me a little surly to hear thoughts about happiness from someone with a huge disposable income and NO CHILDREN. This person has never had an infant spit up curdled milk down the back of her best dress on the way to church, I am pretty sure. I wonder if she has had the pleasure of an ongoing back seat argument between three teenagers and sulking that lasts for the entire 400-mile road trip.
And my argument de’ resistance, Oprah; I submit to you the case of George Bailey, a stand-up guy who knew exactly what he wanted. Nominated for charter membership in the National Geographic Society, George was going to eat coconuts on a beach in Fiji, and was fully prepared to travel the world with his battered second- hand suitcase at the ready. Then the plot unfolded along the lines of a Thomas Rhett song: “you make your plans, and you hear God laughing!” Yes, sometimes it’s the big things, like George’s father dying unexpectedly or a Great Depression pulling the rug out from under a whole nation right before the honeymoon.
Often it’s little things, just the daily grind that snowballs into “you’ve got to be kidding me.” For instance, my sweet mom had been feeling under the weather for nearly 2 weeks. Then her refrigerator died. My sister helped find emergency homes for the ice cream and other contents of her freezer. Fortunately, we had a spare refrigerator which my husband was able to relocate from our shop to her kitchen after hauling the dearly departed appliance to the dump. Unfortunately, when he pulled out the old fridge, he discovered it had a slow and subtle leak that never had the courage to show itself outright as a respectable puddle, but had done a number behind the wall. Because it seemed prudent, he pulled back the vinyl and discovered water damage to the plywood. Well, that had to come out. And would you believe, as the plywood came out, an opportunistic colony of powder post beetles also made an appearance. They had chewed their way just short of the floor joists.
The subfloor had to be replaced, the pest control service was called, and mom had to bring her chicken soup and her blanket to my house so the exterminator could do his thing. My obvious point? We don’t always get what we want. Now, to be fair to Oprah, there is a finer point at the root of happiness on which we agree. It’s not so much the circumstances that determine your happiness, as much as your attitude. As a family, we were quick to give thanks that the refrigerator gave up the ghost when it did. Otherwise, we would never have found the leak, pulled up the flooring, and discovered the gnawing little critters, until one day, as my sister observed, she might have ended up with a refrigerator firmly implanted in the roof of her car in the garage below. I think happiness is not curtailed so much by circumstances as it is by silly and unreasonable human expectations (see the list above).
When it comes to happiness, we all see examples daily that seem to turn conventional wisdom on its head. In recent months the news has been ripe with tragic suicides of the rich and famous; people who have been denied no earthly freedom or pleasure, who have everything we think we desire, and yet they cannot bear their existence.
Ironically then, we encounter people who seem to lose everything; family, wealth, health, mobility, yet they rise above and minister to others, making a gift of their pain and a glory of their weakness. These modern Jobs, these lights shining in darkness, have laid hold of a biblical principle of happiness from Philippians. “Let nothing be done through strife or vainglory, but in lowliness of mind, let each esteem other better than themselves. Look not every man on his own things, but every man also on the things of others.” In other words, you’ll never be happy if you are always thinking only of your own happiness. Selfishness is a lonely place, but suffering is a treasure if it brings you to put an arm around someone else who is also suffering.
In a review of It’s A Wonderful Life online at The Film Spectrum, film critic Jason Fraley observes, “(the film) proves we need the darkness to see the light; the lows to feel the highs; the despair to feel the inspiration.” * What an apt paraphrase for God’s work in bringing about spiritual change in the midst of our weakness.
Control over circumstance is an illusion. The response is the only thing over which we have control. One man might rail against the darkness of the universe when he cannot fill the void with any or every luxury, while another gives thanks for hardship that brings him to rely on something greater than himself.
If George Bailey hadn’t been such a stand-up guy who valued people and relationships above his own happiness, he could have walked away and made his dreams come true. He would have broadened his world and experienced the thrill of adventure, but he might have missed the joy of making the smaller world in which he lived a better place. He might have never experienced his deepest and most lasting joy, that of being indispensable to someone else.
The paradox of humanity is that we are a fire unquenchable, and cannot say “it is enough.” The more we focus on our selves, the emptier we become. Conversely, the more we let go, the more peaceful we feel. As much as I would love to float through life above the tragedy and the traffic, I am growing to an understanding that both hardship and happiness are part of our condition, and both must be embraced as necessary tools in the realization of a joyful self through the knowledge of God.
*retrieved 10/02/2018 from http://thefilmspectrum.com/?p=9240
