What if “Happiness” isn’t what you thought?
“I’m not happy about this,”
said the woman stopped by a passing train, and the man whose grocery bag broke, and the teenager that couldn’t get a break.
Happiness is what we search for, long for, live for. In this society, what aspiration is higher than that? Ask anyone what their long term goals are, and you’ll most likely find happiness quaintly perched atop each list. Now there’s nothing wrong with that, to search for happiness is an innately human response. It’s the way we go about trying to strangle happiness into submission that’s a problem.
I must say, as of late my drug of choice is materialism. I absolutely love 1-click purchasing trivial nicknacks with Amazon Prime. Few experiences parallel the excitement of a brown, unidentifiable brown box staring back at me from my doorstep, awaiting its perfect symmetry to be disrupted by my unrelenting ripping, shredding, sometimes even crushing. This excitement never ends.
Except when the money runs out of course, and it inevitably will. It always does. Which is certainly a problem, in a society tricked into believing that happiness is something to be gained, not an intrinsic quality lying dormant within us all along.
Go to school, get an education, get a job, get married, buy a house, have children, then retire. In our consumerist society it’s always more, always on the horizon. This linear life plan has us trapped within a rigid frame that will break in the face of the slightest opposition, which is this:
You may already be happy, you just don’t know it.
Really? That’s it? Perhaps it’s not all that simple, but speaking from my experience, it definitely rings true. Recently I took a crash course in cognitive behavioral therapy in an attempt to restructure my thinking patterns. What I gained from it was learning to assess my emotions, allowing me to be aware of each feeling and acting based upon whatever it was. Similarly, “naming” various emotions tends to help. What this grinds down to in some ways, is the power of positive thinking etc. This can definitely be effective, but there’s more to it than that.
Happiness takes root not in what you do, but what you don’t do. Remember the woman and the passing train? How she vocally expressed her unhappiness? What’s far more effective than even verbalizing happiness, is simply not verbalizing unhappiness. By omitting negative reactions like that, your default state of mind is naturally more positive.
Happiness is not something to be attained, it’s merely something you are. Like any muscle, it needs to be worked out. Next time you face an inconvenience, ignore it so that it cannot take root, whether in your mind or words. It’s not about what you are, it’s more about what you aren’t.
-M
