Happiness, as most of us think, isn’t just pleasure, or synthetic satisfaction. “Many persons,” as Helen Keller put it, “have a wrong idea of what constitutes true happiness. It is not attained through self-gratification, but through fidelity to a worthy purpose.”
Human happiness cannot exist in a vacuum, or in isolation, because the greatest delight, of which each of us is capable, cannot emerge, or exist, unless others around us are equally happy to relish their share of happiness. This is primarily because true happiness, in reality, goes far beyond the realm of a fixed definition. The more one aspires to ‘achieve’ happiness the worse is the resultant effect. True happiness simply depends on how one feels about it in real life. It comes from within. It is not dependent on outward circumstances. The best mode to make happiness ‘work’ is to energise our sense of well-being, amplify, and also broaden it, and make it more active and vibrant.
Happiness is a state of mind — or, our attitude to life. It, therefore, differs from person to person. This could be, for one, nothing more than a life well-spent, a well-maintained home, a sweet-willed husband, or wife, and bright kids. For others, watching a new TV show on the first day of ‘release’ on Netflix is happiness — a sense of triumph.
Happiness is doing a good job, executing, accomplishing and fulfilling, rather than just winning for personal glory. As philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer said, “We need resistance to raise us, as it raises the airplane, or the bird; we need obstacles against which to sharpen our strength and stimulate our growth.” Yet, whichever way you look at it, happiness is a state of being, as the poet Lizette Reese observed in A Little Song of Life: “Glad that I live am I;/That the sky is blue;/Glad for the country lanes,/And the fall of dew.”
“Happiness,” according to Daniel Goleman, the renowned psychologist, “seems to be largely determined by our genes, not by outside reality. However tragic, or comic, life’s up and downs, people appear to return inexorably to whatever happiness level is pre-set in their constitution.” “The idea,” emphasises Goleman, “is similar to the set-point concept in weight control, a theory that says the brain appears to be ‘wired’ to turn the body’s metabolism up, or down, to maintain a pre-set weight.”
The inference is simple. We have to take the rough with the smooth and the smooth with the rough. We should try to be ourselves, not someone else. This is our only way to happiness.
— First published in First India
