Happiness
I’ve been all over the world. So far in my life, I’ve spent meaningful time in over 20 countries. I’ve lived or worked in as many states in the US and have visited them all. In my lifetime I’ve been pretty poor, financially speaking. I grew up at the far south end of middle class, very often well into the poverty suburbs. My family spent a lot of years living in a bunk house with no indoor toilet, making our way on my father’s stable hand wages. I’ve been homeless a couple of times, too. Not the modern interpretation of the couch-surfing “homeless” with a soft place to crash and a friend’s fridge to raid, but no-shit living on the sidewalk someplace homeless. I’ve also done really well at times. I’ve had to start over more often than I care to admit, but I’ve hit some real high notes. I’ve started companies and flown them directly into the ground. I’ve started others and landed lucrative contracts and been able to pay myself well. I’ve been to war, to disasters, to regions of catastrophe and human suffering. I’ve been to the coolest places you can imagine and seen the stuff they make movies and postcards about. I’ve been very fortunate in all of this because it has given me a life of perspective. It’s given me the experiences and the personal ups and downs to be able to relate to most people in most places, even when our lives are very different in the moment. Being on the move, having several passports full of stamps, having spent my youth trying to satisfy an insatiable wanderlust and thirst for adventure gave me insights there’s simply no other way for a human being to develop. Looking back, it’s given me the single most useful lesson I’ve ever learned. Here it is:
Happiness is a choice.
I can hear the arguments already, and I can feel the inbox message count growing with messages that start with things like “Well, actually…” so let me clarify. Happiness is not something life hands out because you deserve it or even because you want it. It’s not some state of being assigned to you because you’ve done all the things you’re supposed to do and collected all the stuff you’re supposed to have. It isn’t apportioned out among the populace in equal fractions. It’s a choice - or rather it’s a series of choices - to teach yourself how to find joy in the parts of the world that are joyful, to celebrate what’s worth celebrating, to love the people and things and moments that are worth loving. It’s the mindset to prioritize those things over the bad stuff. And before you get to whatever argument or excuse you’re sitting on to try and refute that idea, let me tell you this. I’ve been to places of such crashing, breathtaking poverty that literal wars would be fought over the things you throw away every day. Even in these places where a human life is worth less than an empty plastic container that can be used to carry water in, where little kids own one pair of shorts, no shoes, no shirts, and have no access to anything at all - I saw smiles. I saw happiness. I saw compassion and love and laughter and joy. It taught me that if they can do it, anybody can do it. And we should.
We’re in the middle of the Holiday Season. It’s a time of Great Wokeness in America, where gatekeepers of joy and happiness go on the offensive to make sure that none of us express our happiness too loudly, lest we offend or upset the less fortunate. Not to be left behind, it’s also a time when believers of all stripes feel the need to correct others on how they express their good wishes. It’s “Merry Christmas, not Happy Holidays.” I mean, if that’s the way you feel about it, then we probably have different definitions about what it means to wish someone well, but I’ll save that for another entry. I see endless posts on social media chiding and admonishing people for putting up pictures of their Christmas trees or sharing pictures of gifts all wrapped up for the kids. It’s as if people are allergic to photographic evidence of happiness and gratitude. “This year, don’t post pictures of all the things in your life worth celebrating because you being publicly happy will somehow hurt those who aren’t.” What unmitigated bullshit that is. The world has never become a darker place because people smiled and celebrated and loved each other. It gives us a great excuse to practice the art of choosing happiness, and I’m not one to waste a learning opportunity.
This year, if you are among the fortunate ones who have lots of reasons to be grateful, please share it and share it widely. You are the ones who’ll provide the raw material for the rest to use in their practice. If you’re not among the more fortunate, I want you to try something. Look around you and find the smiles, the happiness, the joy in others. Stare at it until it makes you smile. Find the thing that makes you smile whether you want to or not. Babies laughing. Drunken friends singing bad karaoke. Cats running into glass doors and then quickly pretending it didn’t happen. Maybe just a sunrise bringing a little bit of light to your day. It doesn’t matter if it makes life all better. It doesn’t matter if it doesn’t pay your bills or take away your medical condition or heal your heartbreak. It doesn’t actually have to fix anything at all, in fact. The only thing this little exercise has to do is remind you of something we all tend to forget when times get hard. The lone objective of the exercise is to jog your memory and highlight to you, even for just a second, that there is an abundance of happiness in this world - and it’s worth celebrating. Do that, and you’ll start to understand what that candle lighting exercise was all about when you were a kid. Remember? One candle is lit. It tips a little toward the candle next to it and lights that wick. That one lights another, then another, until the whole room is full of light. The first candle loses nothing by lighting the one next to it just as we each lose nothing by sharing our love and joy and happiness with others. The candle that is lit next uses that to go from being cold and dark to being bright and warm. This simple act of tipping a little and allowing that light to pass to you accomplishes a lot. It gives you the same light and warmth, sure, but it also gives you the power to be someone else’s light and warmth. Pretty small way to begin lighting the world if you think about it.
Sometimes, the wind blows the light out. Sometimes the candle burns down and there’s just nothing left. Life is a real grind sometimes, and none of this is meant as some Hallmarky “be happy even when you’re not happy and you’ll get happy” platitude. It’s a real and very powerful exercise in making a choice to improve your life when all circumstances conspire to ruin it. I don’t want you to pretend to be happy. I want you to choose happiness over misery. Seek it. Look for it. You don’t have to own it - just find out where it exists and look at it long enough to remind you that not everything sucks all the time. Learn to choose that more often than you choose to dwell on the suck. Learn that when the candle burns down or goes out, you can go find another one and that all it takes to light it again is to tip your wick toward some source of light and let it become yours. It’s a choice, and that means it’s a mental process that takes learning and remembering and practice. But it’s worth it. It’s more than worth it. It’s mandatory if you have any interest in being part of a better tomorrow. So learn to choose to clap instead of criticizing. Celebrate wins, whether they’re yours or someone else’s. Choose to smile when you see a couple in love or a little kid chasing a butterfly instead of resenting them for having something you don’t have. Like the selfie someone took because they felt pretty that day and wanted to share it. Build instead of demolishing. You don’t have to do it all the time, and you’re allowed to fail and fall short. Just don’t let those things keep you from choosing happiness again.
Happy holidays, everyone, however you choose to celebrate them. No matter what your year has handed you, and no matter what’s to come, I hope sincerely that it brings you joy.