On Happiness

 

  Happiness isn’t the easiest thing to define.  There are all sorts of contingencies, mainly temporal.  Happy moments pop up in the midst of sorrow.  Joy in the form of relief is necessarily preceded by a painful drama.  An amalgam of happy sadness is conveyed by a wan smile.  Mellow joy might be evoked from a poignant, touching vignette steeped in melancholy.  One looks back fondly on cherished moments, but the memories are tinged with regret that they exist only in the past.  Occasions of pure exhilaration, when all cares are cast to the wind, never avoid contamination for long, for the wind blows where it wills, and disquietude returns with the next fickle shift in direction. 

            Of happiness I can say this: it is not a purely blissful state, unfettered by threats from without or the aching of wounds that linger within, blemishes that persistently remind of unhappy experiences.  My best definition, I guess, is “peace-of-mind,” a homophone, I must digress, to “piece of mind,” which is what one imparts toward another with whom one is distinctly unhappy; and “Pop!” a little, joyful zing ignites from the realization of that irony.  

Peace-of-mind, in my experience, is ephemeral.  But I have encountered a sort of timeless peace-of-mind in meditation.  Time, which lies at the heart of ephemerality, melts away during a deep, meditative state.  It has no meaning.  Upon emergence the evanescent peaceful glow fades but leaves something for which I have no definition other than to describe as the opposite of a scar.  My deepest experience of this phenomenon occurred when I attended a 10-day silent retreat at a Vipassana center in western Massachusetts.  My digs consisted of a small, solitary, spartan, but very comfortable room with an attached bath.  No books, magazines, computers, or devices of any sort, save a watch, were allowed.  Conversation with other participants, including greetings, nods, or gestures, was strictly forbidden.  Conversations with the retreat facilitators were limited to the subject of creature needs for getting through the week.  One could engage the leader/teacher for a total time not exceeding five minutes daily and discussion was confined to meditation techniques.  Philosophy and idle chat were forbidden.  When the time limit was reached a gentle gong sounded from without and the facilitator entered to bring the session to a close.  The rest of the day was spent either in the meditation hall, about 6 to 8 hours, in one’s room resting or meditating, at a meal, or at a brief exercise period where one could, if he chose, stroll about the grounds, silently.  My session took place in the middle of winter with lots of snow and very cold temperatures; the grounds weren’t beckoning.

It was, as one fellow participant described it on the eleventh day when silence was broken, a fasting of the mind.  There were almost no distractions.  Out of desperation for entertainment I lay upon my bed and counted off 60 seconds, hiding my watch, to see how accurately I could match the concealed second hand.  About the 5th day I began to imagine that the smoke detector on the ceiling above my bed hid a camera and that our cars in an adjacent parking lot, and quite off limits, had been absconded with.  In brief, I became pathologically paranoid.  I considered leaving, but I listened to a quiet voice that persists at times of delight and misery, whether I’m keenly aware or in a drunken stupor.  It is a voice of unerring reason and wisdom, and it only abandons me when I foolishly banish it.  It told me to stay, and I did.  So, in the midst of fearful paranoia and more than a few nightmares, I found episodes of timeless peace.  By the 7th or 8th day, and this is difficult to describe, one experiences a tingling sensation that moves along the trunk and appendages during the meditation sessions.  One learns to control it, to propel the sensation along the body as desired and even, by the 9th day, to extend it beyond the body. In fact, the body melts away.  The tingling, by this time, persists between the sessions. It never leaves.  

One evening, eight days in, with the tingling moving strongly across my body, I suddenly recalled that as a boy, in my bedroom, I conjured up the same sensation.  I was terrified of the dark, but I was forbidden to run to my parents for solace, so I could only lie in my bed and endure the wild, nocturnal imaginings of my active mind.  I learned to enter naturally into a state of meditation on those nights.  It was the only refuge available, and I found it.  I watched the tingling roam along my body in the 1950s, just as I was doing on this night, decades later.  The tingling distracted me from my boyhood fear.  It caressed me.  It was happiness encapsulated in fear.  

I equate fascination with happiness; boredom is misery.  There was a period in my life when I fell into a crevasse of fear and depression so deep that fascination for anything in this world abandoned me.  I suffered from the illusion that I needed something or someone from without to “make me happy.”  A woman whom I once knew, with whom I was in love, younger but, at least in this instance, wiser, said to me, “You have to make yourself happy.”  Such a simple yet brilliant statement, a condensed version of a Lincoln quote, “Most people are about as happy as they make up their mind to be.” I hold this, still, as a deep truth.  In the darkest moment, when, in an act of supreme petulance, I swallowed a boatload of diazepam, enough to land me in the hospital for a week, the quiet voice, which I had ceased to heed, reasserted itself.  In the ensuing months, gradually, I found fascination, or it found me.  I was once again seduced by the mystery of this life.  I dug out my old books and discovered new ones.  I returned to a responsible and creative pursuit of my career.  I pressed my right to engage my children.  I got out of myself by cooking in a homeless shelter.  I learned to fly an airplane, expanded my circle of friends, and jettisoned misgivings regarding discussion of topics that fascinated me.  I forgave myself despite the realization that others would never forgive me.  A trusted counselor once implored me, “Choose life, Michael!”  I did.  I emerged from what has been called “the dark night of the soul” to find happiness, albeit a happiness suffused in sorrow.  I came to understand the sage’s admonition, “When you pick up one end of a stick you also pick up the other.” Joy and sorrow are part of the same, indivisible whole; one cannot exist without the other.   

On my journey, while pursuing my fascination with the nature of this life, I have studied the wisdom of many other travelers.  M. Scott Peck, in a lecture following publication of his book, The Road Less Traveled, recited a quote that has instilled itself into my soul.  It describes the necessity of enduring sorrow, and it reads as follows:

 

That internal rending called the ‘broken heart’ is the especial lot of all sensitive people.  No such person lives long in this world before having his or her heart broken; and as time goes by the world sunders the broken heart into smaller and ever smaller pieces.  However, these people also come to know, beyond any doubt, that the important thing is to let the world break the human heart, for there is room in the broken heart, and only there, for all the sorrow in the world.  The broken heart, and only it, is curative, redemptive, of the wasteland around.  Moreover, it is the very raw material necessary for a strange and important alchemy that has been described in the words, ‘Your sorrow shall be turned into joy.’  

                                                           (Unknown attribution, some have credited “a medieval monk”)

          Henry David Thoreau admonished his reader to “live deliberately” and I strive daily to follow that dictum.  He says, “There is no value in life except what you choose to place upon it and no happiness in any place except what you bring to it yourself.”  Read or listen to Thoreau, the language is glorious, the syntax luxuriously mellifluous.  I liken the consumption of Thoreau’s writing to eating cheesecake.  I particularly enjoy being spoon fed via Audible as I drive. Thoreau’s richly descriptive prose treats the ears like a four-part harmony.  But, like a decadent dessert, I can only ingest so much at one sitting. It requires focused effort to follow the writer attentively.  By the end of a session, I am exhausted.  

Perhaps a better metaphor is to describe engaging Thoreau as the mental equivalent of physical labor in the pursuit of a creative outcome, even, and perhaps especially, in a mundane task, such as stacking firewood neatly.  During such toil, a charmed focus takes over, one that banishes bothersome distractions, like black flies for instance, yet allows conscious apprehension of beguiling observations, like clouds hovering on the distant mountain peaks.  Task completed, the tired laborer relaxes and reflects, fulfilled and expanded.  This is what Thoreau desired from his reader, 

To read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will task the reader more than any exercise which the customs of the day esteem.  It requires a training such as the athletes underwent, the steady intention almost of the whole life to this object.  Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written.

Reflection on a helping of Thoreau or a fresh-stacked wood pile offers the same reward - the weary but curious mind pokes idly into newly available crannies exposed by either labor.  Insights turn up like pretty shells on a low-tide, Sanibel beach.  A joy prevails that Thoreau explains thus, “Happiness is like a butterfly, the more you chase it, the more it will evade you, but if you notice the other things around you, it will gently come and sit on your shoulder.” 

Five years ago, I began the process of discarding my career.  I gave up client-facing practice but continued as a consultant and teacher a few hours a week.  Last year I fully retired when I did not renew my professional license.  This was a scary proposition at the time but one with which I am now quite comfortable.  I am not without vanity, and I recognized that it was the status that accompanied “being a veterinarian” that I was most reluctant to leave behind.  This was, perhaps, an empty conceit in which I alone believed.  Those whom I hold in esteem, whose respect matters most, judged me, for better or worse, by more substantial measures. 

In these retired hours, which I can spend as I choose, I find some kind of peace-of-mind.  But it is not unfettered.  I recently spoke by telephone with a high school friend with whom I lost touch over a half century ago.  He spent a career shoeing horses, amongst other pursuits.  He pointed out to me, in the parlance of his trade, “We are running out of track.”  Of that reality I am keenly aware.  I was the youngest of four siblings.  Always the youngest, but no longer young.  It is that unassailable fact that now fills me with incredulity.  “How could I, always the youngest, never quite ready, oft left behind, the one for whom arrangements must be made, whose ears weren’t ready for that discussion, whose mind must be spared that hard truth,” be now, unequivocally, old?  It is no longer realistic for me to think decades ahead.  I face death with a curiosity suffused with swirling concepts and possibilities and some of these occasionally interfere with my desired equanimity. Even the brightest and most powerful among us don’t know what lies beyond.  But billions of sapiens have crossed that threshold, and billions more will follow, including me.  It’s a mystery.  I delight in mystery.  But does the prospect make me happy?