Pursuit Of Happiness

We chase after it, when it is waiting all about us.

“Are you happy?” I asked my son, Yi Jun, one day because he always look unhappy. “Yes or no, it depends on what you mean,” he said.

“Then tell me,” I continued, “When was the last time you think you were happy?”

“Perhaps 6th December.” he said.

It served me right for putting a serious question to someone who has joked his way through life. But Yi Jun’s answer reminded me that when we think about happiness, we usually think of something extraordinary, a pinnacle of sheer delight – and those pinnacles seem to get rarer the older we get.

For a child, happiness has a magical quality. I remember making hide-outs in big pipes, playing cops and robbers in the woods, getting a speaking part in the school play. Of course, kids also experience lows, but their delight at such peaks of pleasure as winning a race or getting a new bike is unreserved.

In the teenage years the concept of happiness changes. Suddenly it’s conditional on such things as excitement, love, popularity and whether that zit will clear up before prom night.

In adulthood the things that bring profound joy – birth, love, marriage also – bring responsibility and the risk of loss.

In dictionary defines happy as “lucky” or “fortunate”, but I think a better definition of happiness is “the capacity for enjoyment”. The more we can enjoy what we have, the happier we are. It’s easy to overlook the pleasure we get from loving and being loved, the company of friends, the freedom to live where we please, and even good health.

Yesterday, I added up my little moments of pleasure. First there was sheer bliss after I enjoy my delicious breakfast and had the house to myself. My wife and younger son was going back Sri Cheeding home village. Then I spent an uninterrupted evening writing my blog, which I love. When they com home, I enjoy another pleasure – intimacy. Sometimes just the knowledge that he wants me can bring me joy.

You never know where happiness will turn up next. Perhaps you like lonely shopping day, but sometime shopping with a group of people can chats and really cheers you up.

I get a thrill from driving. One day I stopped to let a car turn onto a side road. The driver grinned and gave me hand up sign. We were two allies in a world of mad motorists. It made me smile.

We all experience moments like these. Too few of us register them as happiness.

Psychologists tell us that to be happy we need a blend of enjoyable leisure time and satisfying work. I doubt that my father was 74 years old, who raised 5 children and took in shoes making. He did have a network of close friends and family, and maybe this was what fulfilled him. If he was happy with what he had, perhaps it was because he didn’t expect life to be very different.

We, on the other hand, with so many choices and such pressure to succeed in every area, have turned happiness into one more thing we “gotta have.” We’re so self – conscious about our “right” to it that it’s making us miserable. So we chase it and equate it with wealth and success, without noticing that the people who have those things aren’t necessarily happier.

While happiness may be more complex for us, the solution is the same as ever. Happiness isn’t about what happens to us – it’s about how we perceive what happens to us. It’s the knack of finding a positive for every negative, and viewing a setback as a challenge. It’s not wishing for what we don’t have, but enjoying what we do possess.