To some it’s a black dog, a brown cloud or a dark forest. To others it’s like falling into a gaping abyss; like drowning while everyone around you keeps breathing.
To me, it’s a very bright, white room.
The walls are brick, painted with watered-down, white paint. I’m standing in the middle with my eyes closed, dressed in white too. There’s sunlight everywhere — the kind that just stops you from opening your eyes quite enough to perceive the details of your immediate surroundings. I’m not sure if there’s a ceiling or a window; I can’t open my eyes to see that much. In my ears is the low hum of static; white noise.
At other times, I’m keenly aware of my surroundings; able to perceive in detail the world from within a perspex case. The electric fizz of anxiety keeps my feet rooted to the ground and my hands pinned to my sides — or clawing at the walls; I’m not quite sure which. I’m immobile but moving, unable to string two thoughts together for the rush of syntax screeching about in my head. The noise brings my bodily functions to a standstill while the Enigma machine in my head tries to unscramble and decode.
There’s always a sense of immobility.
There’s also always a sense of dissonance, as if you have been cut clean in two. Although you see the real world more clearly and rationally than you ever have before, you’ve never felt so disconnected from it. No matter what you do, you’re unable to properly participate in life beyond routine and habit.
It’s this dissonant feeling that knots the bottom of your stomach and hangs in the air, invisible but never unnoticed. It’s like living through cling film; always a barrier between what little you can manage to do right now, and what you hope to reach — or, at least, what you imagine you would hope to reach if your heart was able to muster any hope. And so you float listlessly, feeling you understanding more of the world than most of the people who blunder about in it each day, but feeling increasingly powerless to become part of it.
I’ve come to believe it’s a mistake to assume that the meaning of life is happiness. Happiness is so beyond our power that it cannot be trusted as a measure of goodness: one chemical reaction in the brain; one miscalculation of the thyroid gland and happiness is but a distant memory — one we’re sure exists but can’t imagine what it would feel like. And so, it begins to feel like something we made up, though we’re almost certain it happened.
The White Cloud Foundation estimates that in any year, one million Australians (including 10,000 young people), while 2.3 suffer from anxiety. And according to BeyondBlue, one in six people will be depressed at some point in their lives, and one in four will experience anxiety. According to all sources, most people don’t receive the care or treatment they require. Tell any of these people that happiness is the meaning of life, and they’ll be even more depressed than before.
Happiness is, after all, the one thing that is not within their power to attain. Indeed, for most people, happiness is fleeting; like an exotic, caged bird that always seems to escape from between the bars and fly off to a distant paradise. It cannot be tamed, trapped or held. And yet, we are consumed by it; we spend all our money, energy, time and passion attempting to attain it.
And it’s not because we’re dissatisfied with happiness once we get it — it has very little to do with being ungrateful. In fact, as CS Lewis puts it, “we are far too easily pleased.” Our happiness is not the thing with the problem: it’s our imaginations. Lewis explains:
“We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea.”
We’ve missed the bigger picture. If we go around assuming that the meaning of life is something we can never attain — or at least never hold onto — we’ll spend our most of our lives searching in despair when we should have been living in hope. If life is only about happiness, and not also about pain, struggle, and darkness, then it’s not about endurance, strength, overcoming odds, or affecting change for the better either. It means we should ignore the sufferings of others, never doing anything to help or heal — because their weakness simply comes from the inability to attain happiness.
The truth is, we’ve forgotten that life isn’t ever just one colour, but it’s many.
This is what I wrote in a letter to my niece on the day she was born:
“Dear girl, it won’t always be easy — in fact, some days will be really hard. Sometimes it’ll hurt like hell, and at other times threaten to explode with happiness. Sometimes life won’t make sense at all; won’t feel like anything much at all. One thing is for sure: it’s a mistake to think life should be like this or like that — that it should only be one thing; or that it should always be happy. Life isn’t always happy, and it’s certainly never just one thing.
“Each day has its own colour, and each season has its end. A life isn’t a life if its not coloured in, whether it’s dark one day and bright the next.”
Even joyful people have their dark days, just as those who despair have their lighter days. But that doesn’t mean joy doesn’t exist. And joy — joy is so much more than happiness. It’s the thing that allows the colours of our life to be even richer than before.
Whenever I found myself in that white room or perspex case, it would feel like the ground had given way into an infinite chasm. There was little to cling to. Now, though I might be at my worst, unable to feel anything at all (least of all happiness), there is something at the base of it all, always constant: joy.
Joy exists even when all the colour drains from your world. Joy exists even when the white room threatens to suffocate you. It is that seed of hope that gets you up in the morning; that allows seconds to tick into minutes, which roll into hours, until slowly the hours begin to pass and it’s evening and you’ve made it through the day.
Joy is the house skipped by the firestorm; left untouched by the tornado; snowed in but still standing when the ice melts away. It’s constant in this mad, unpredictable world.
Even when happiness leaves you, joy stays.
