How to be Happy through Good Times and Bad
“Those weeks of social distancing reminded me how much I need physical touch to be happy” the checkout lady at our local grocery store said to me once. Like me, she, and everyone else, wants to be happy. On this single point, East and West concur. From Socrates to the Buddha, great thinkers observe an unquenchable human thirst for happiness.
More than 40 years ago, I began a serious study of western philosophy in the hope of achieving personal happiness through wisdom and self-knowledge, intending to share that benefit with others. I imagined that decades of study and teaching would deliver me equanimity and joy. I even made the study of how to behave (ethics) my core focus. Yet anxiety continued to haunt me, and joyfulness eluded me.
A recent discovery has given me hope.
The happiness drive is baked into the American psyche. It was articulated in the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” It has become the most famous of all English language sentences. Regardless of what Jefferson had in mind when he penned those words, Americans now find the right to be happy printed on their national birth certificate. It is viewed by many as the basis of universal human rights. All people enjoy inalienable human rights, among them, the right to a happy life. The fundamental question is: how to achieve that right? What is the proper path to happiness?
Capitalism, a product of Western civilization, has generally taken a hedonistic utilitarian approach, equating good with pleasure then advocating whatever societal choices produce the most good while minimizing suffering. The English philosophers John Locke (1632 — 1704) and John Stewart Mill (1806 — 1873) are most often cited when advancing these theories. Locke has sometimes been mistaken for a pure hedonist, advocating simple pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of pain as the road to happiness. Looking more carefully one finds him observing “For if there be no Prospect beyond the Grave, the inference is certainly right, Let us eat and drink, let us enjoy what we delight in, for tomorrow we shall die [Isa, 22:13; I Cor. 15:32]. (Essay, II.xxi.55) Locke’s caveat, the “Prospect beyond the Grave”, signals his concern for the judgment day, when God evaluates people’s decisions in life. More importantly, Locke observes a variety and difference between people, leading to a host of different desires and goods. Because everyone is unique, what makes each person happy will differ according to their individual desires, values and preferences. By this logic, there can be no universal solution to the problem of happiness. Instead, modern liberal society and capitalism, its economic doppelgänger, highly value freedom and tolerance. Each individual should be free to pursue their unique vision of happiness, with everyone tolerating difference so long as one person’s pursuit of happiness does not infringe upon the freedom of others to maximize their own vision of happiness.
Materialist capitalism promotes the belief that having wealth leads to happiness. Yet those of us living in capitalist societies often marvel at a paradox. How common it is to encounter very unhappy people of great wealth while, at other times, we meet people with few possessions who exhibit genuine contentment. Similarly, we often hear that good health is a precondition for happiness. Without health one cannot be happy. And yet we often hear of, or meet people suffering chronic, even terminal, illness who feel happy in spite of their illness? At the same time, we meet people in perfect physical health who suffer from severe depression. Somehow, neither wealth nor health guarantee happiness. Nor do illness or poverty preclude it. What then?
2,500 years ago, Gautama Buddha took an alternate approach. While he granted that everyone longs for happiness, the Buddha observed all life involves suffering (dukkha). The Buddha’s second noble truth — all suffering derives from an “attachment to the desire to have and the desire not to have.” In other words, Buddha disagrees with the Western concept of happiness. Having desires satisfied can never lead to true happiness. People suffer when they desire for a certain outcome, or when they desire to avoid another outcome — because both longings reflect an attachment to outcome and, when frustrated, as they ultimately must be, suffering results. The best path to happiness, according to the Buddha, comes not from pursuing pleasure, but from an understanding and elimination of suffering. Every negative experience (suffering), from mild irritation, annoyance, frustration and disappointment to deep sadness and despair, flow from our attachment to outcome. We may fear pain or sorrow. We may regret a past decision. Wherever one finds psychological suffering, scratch below the surface and one finds attachment. Haruki Murakami popularized this notion writing: “Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.” Even pleasure, when achieved, coexists with the knowledge that “this too shall pass” leading to instability and suffering. The only way out of suffering is non-attachment.
It is sometimes said that, for the Buddhist, meditation ends attachment and suffering by turning off the mind. Having the mind stop thinking, according to this prescription, would be the best way to achieve happiness by doing away with attachment. Jaggi Vasudev (also known as Sadhguru) observed that the human brain is an organ of exquisite complexity. It took the universe billions of years to evolve brains. According to Sadhguru, we can be certain of the exact moment that the brain’s mind will stop. Like other beautiful and complex organs in our bodies (heart, liver, kidneys) our brain will stop when our heart stops, when our liver stops, when our kidneys stop. That is, when we die. No one meditates, hoping to stop their heart, kidneys or liver. Nor should we wish to stop our minds.
Rather than seeking to stop the mind, meditation aims to perfect it. Take an analogy. We admire those athletes who win Olympic gold medals. Why? Because those individuals, and teams of individuals, through years of training, have developed control over their bodies. They have built strength, flexibility, and precision, allowing them to achieve exceptional performance. Their bodies function as finely calibrated instruments, performing at an extraordinary level. In the same way, we admire artists — painters, sculptors, musicians, dancers, poets, play writes, composers — because, through years of effort, they have found extraordinary ways to express their creativity, their feelings, their inner voice.
Likewise meditation. It is not a pathway to happiness by signaling the brain to stop. Nor is its sole objective to end suffering through liberation from attachment. Rather, meditation is the mind’s gymnasium, its artistic workshop. The goal of meditation is to give us the power to control our minds, much as an Olympic athlete controls her body, or the great artist controls artistic expression. But control to what end?
Ironically, through my own practice of meditation, I’m discovering that both East and West hold part of the happiness secret. What we have and what we experience plays an important role in our happiness (West). Regardless of quantity, we all have some things. We may live in a modest home, rather than a mansion. Perhaps, through misfortune we are reduced to nothing more than this breath. As long as we are alive, we still have this one breath. The key to happiness is to cultivate the capacity to appreciate whatever one has or is experiencing, in the moment, without attachment (East). Appreciate this momentary sensation, even if it is a painful one, it is reminding us that we are alive. Whenever we can appreciate the beauty, the wonder, the uniqueness, the miracle of being alive, in this present moment, without attachment, there we can find happiness. People who experience joy, whether rich or poor, whether healthy or ill, are those people able to appreciate without attachment. They love what is without trying to possess it. They let it go, and love what comes.
Much of the poetic work of Mary Oliver speaks to this capacity for joyful embrace and release. She concludes her poem In Blackwater Woods with this recognition: “everything I have learned in my lifetime leads back to this: the fires and the black river of loss whose other side is salvation, whose meaning none of us will ever know. To live in this world you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal: to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it; and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go.” Similarly, half way through her poem A Summer Day she confesses: “I don’t know exactly what a prayer is. I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass, how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields, which is what I have been doing all day.” Again, in her poem Messenger she describes a wish for her life: “Let me keep my mind on what matters, which is my work…which is mostly standing still and learning to be astonished.”
In short, we all want to be happy. To get there, we should not focus on how much we have. Nor should we long to maximize our peak experiences. We should not even seek to minimize our suffering. Instead, in every moment, if we can be grateful for what we have and are experiencing, right down to the most basic of all possessions and experiences, this present life sustaining breath, then we will experience happiness. Accept and appreciate the truth of your present moment, without being attached to any particular outcome or result. Be grateful. Accept and love what is. If your past habits make it difficult at first to achieve this worthy posture, then spend time in the meditation weight room, to craft a more cooperative mind.
Joy awaits us in every moment.
