DEFINING HAPPINESS

Five or six years ago while I was on my afternoon break at work, a colleague and friend came into the staffroom and out of the blue asked me “are you happy?” I replied without hesitation “define happiness,” thus prompting a very quick exit stage left from said colleague who was obviously not in the mood for a philosophical debate. The question and my answer has played on my mind since and I even incorporated it into my book The Sum of all Parts as the protagonist herself is dealing, in part, with finding her own form of happiness.
My protagonist is striving for happiness but is still “working on a definition of happy”. You see, happiness is very hard to define and can mean many different things to many different people. According to my favourite (and ancient dictionary) Virtues English Dictionary, Encyclopaedic Edition (Editors Richard Ferrar Patterson, M.A., D.Litt. & John Dougall, M.A., D.Sc.) to be happy is:
‘being in the enjoyment of agreeable sensations from the possession of good; contented in mind; highly pleased with one’s self and one’s position; satisfied; fortunate; successful; secure of good; bringing or attended with good fortune; prosperous; propitious; favourable; well suited for a purpose or occasion; well devised; felicitous; apt; living in concord or friendship.’
Quite a lot to take in I think you’ll agree. Happiness is certainly hard to pin down and I think that is partly due to the fact that it can be so closely intertwined with love. Happiness and love are slippery little buggers. Happiness – and, I’m sad to say,sometimes love too – is fleeting, transient. It is something to be glimpsed only on occasion. My protagonists’ ‘friend’ in The Sum of all Parts says “happiness is when you have a rainbow in your brain” and I suppose happiness is a bit like a rainbow in the sense that it is fleeting, it appears suddenly to brighten our lives but tends to quickly fade away.
The problem with happiness as I see itis that today’s culture is pushing it as a definite given, we have a sense of self entitlement regards it. And not only do we believe we are entitled to happiness, we are under the misconception that once happiness is attained it will be with us permanently. So we strive after it or simply expect it to drop in and are then shocked when upon attaining some degree of happiness that it disappears as quickly as it arrived. The result? We are more down in the dumps than we were in the first place.
Happiness may not always be achievable. We need to accept that happiness is hard to come by and even harder to keep. Maybe instead of happiness we should instead, as my narrator Thoughts in The Sum of all Parts suggests, strive for contentment instead:
"Why do we as a species continually strive for happiness? Happiness is elusive and it is transient. It is not a sustainable emotion. Instead, we should be striving for contentment, for our minds to be at peace. We should strive to be satisfied with what we have and with our circumstances. We should be easy in our minds and not complaining, opposing, demanding. A satisfaction of mind without anxiousness or a craving for something else: this is what we should be reaching for."
Happiness or contentment? A rainbow in our brain or peace and tranquillity? Now there’s a philosophical debate….

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