Show me your happiness
One of my favourite questions to ask someone new is “What is your definition of happiness?” What makes your heart swell with pure, unfiltered joy? What makes your entire body hum with pleasure and a sigh of contentment escape your lips? What melts you into a puddle of comfort and elation? What makes your toes curl with mirth?
The answers to these questions can be anything. There’s no wrong way to experience happiness (except of course physically harming someone-because if that’s what makes you happy, you’ve got a serious problem dude, you need to get that checked. IMMEDIATELY.)
Now let me explain.
When I first started working, I was nervous but quickly made some friends, all of whom were from different areas of the country and led very varied lives. As the weeks went on I became closer with a few of the women. Most of them worked in the department I was in and we had tea and lunch together in the staff cafeteria every day.
One woman rarely ate the meals provided, instead going for small bowls of fruit or even just a glass of water. I found this strange because food is one of my love languages. My confusion came to a head on the birthday of one of my colleagues, there was a huge chocolate cake for everyone in the cafeteria. As I made my way to the table with three slices tightly gripped in my hands because one does not drop cake, I noticed that the woman hadn’t had a single thing to eat. I let my overly-curious nature and persistent confusion get the better of me (I was young and foolish, allow it kindly) and asked her about her apparent dislike for the cafeteria food. She responded that she didn’t like to eat at all, that food disgusted her and made her feel nauseous and sick. I held out a slice of cake, passionately explaining that cake was among my favourite things in life; especially chocolate cake, that it made me giddy with glee. She pushed my offering away saying she’d tried cakes and knew that they made her feel as sick as every other food.
I turned away, sad and even more confused. I understood the basic concept of someone not sharing my interests and preferences, but to be revolted by something that brought me such joy? I was absolutely stunned.
I learned later that the woman was suffering from an eating disorder and had a physical and mental aversion to food.
This experience was my first encounter with such a striking difference in the meaning of happiness. In learning about the woman’s illness, I began to question the concept of happiness and how it differs for each of us. I had always thought that food was something that made every person universally happy, but I realised that there was no way that anything could be universal. There is always someone differentiated by their mental, physical, or emotional background and health, who would be unable or unwilling to feel the same as me. This doesn’t make anyone’s emotions less valid, it just exemplifies the way in which people are unique. Because happiness is specific to each individual person, when someone feels happy it may bring them back to a different experience that made them feel the same way, leading them down a road detailing their own joy.
There cannot be one thing that makes every single person on earth happy. Maybe Nutella, but I’m quite convinced that it is not a creation of this world but definitive proof that magic does indeed exist, so it doesn’t count.
Think of this as a mathematical algorithm, in which every one of the seven billion people currently in existence somehow classified and entered a list of the things that make them happy. The statistical probability of every single person having at least one aspect in common is practically zero.
Each thing that makes me feel happy has a counter in at least one person. The happiness I feel when I see fireworks is the opposite emotion of a person with PTSD, who may feel definitively unhappy while having the exact same experience. Such are the distinctive lives we lead.
Because of this, are we all truly adrift and separate in terms of our experience of happiness? Or, despite the fact that different things are catalysts for our happiness, do we all share the same actual emotion when we feel it?
I sometimes find myself wondering if everyone else feels as I do when I’m happy, regardless of the cause or the description — if the same emotion can be translated differently through language, culture, and experience. Is the way I feel when I’m reading a book the way someone else feels when they look at their favourite piece of art? I would like to hope that the answer is yes; that regardless of any identity or experience, everyone shares the same raw emotion. We might describe or express it differently, but deep down it is really the same basic concept of bliss.
I obviously can’t express this sentiment with any kind of certainty whatsoever because I can’t enter people’s minds and see if they all feel happiness the way I do. We can show where happiness is processed in the brain (the Limbic Cortex just FYI); but I don’t think we can ever actually know if happiness feels the same way to all of us.
Happiness has unique forms for each of us, filtered and defined through the course of each of our lives, but the raw emotion is a unifying aspect of human life. I am well aware that the belief we all share this binding feeling is idealistic, highly unlikely and incredibly naive. But it is a lovely thought and a girl can dream.
Even if it can never be fully proven, it is something I think we should all aspire to believe. We all exist in such different circumstances, each with our own individual journeys and hardships in a world that is doing its utmost to tear us apart and separate us. Isn’t it a beautiful concept, that if we were to peel back the layers of our humanity, we would find that we all share such a basic feeling with each other? That we are all, at our core, connected?
I certainly think so.
