The Thursday! Newsletter 1-27: Let's Get Happy?
Volume 1, Issue 27
I started to write about happiness this week, but then I stopped.
In fact, I deleted a few sentences I had already written. What's more, I almost scrapped this week's newsletter entirely and sent you a couple lame sentences of explanation and a "technical difficulties" picture from an episode of The Simpsons. What? I have a couple handy. Who doesn't?
The truth is I don't know a lot about happiness. I'm not a happy guy, naturally. Most days, I'm the opposite. I try very hard to keep my mood light and goofy; if I don't, I turn inward quickly and for way too long. I get quiet and intense or quiet and scatter-brained. The quick rule is that if I'm quiet and I don't seem to be paying attention to anything in particular, I've gone way too far into my own head and I'm intensely unhappy.
So when I started to write about happiness and how we can do little things each day to make ourselves happy, it felt fake. What in the world do I know about happiness? I'm not a happiness scholar. I'm not a comedian nor a counselor. I don't know anything more about being happy than anyone else and I probably know less, given how quickly I can go from being content little Pooh Bear to being raincloud-stalked Eeyore. The truth is, I suck at being happy.
This is not for lack of trying. I've read perhaps half a dozen books on happiness, most of them full of useful information and lots of smart research and science and whatnot. Nothing seems to stick. I've listened to podcasts about happiness. Same thing. I talk to a couple close and trusted friends and I'm convinced that, more often than not, they come out of the conversation less happy than when they went in. I've tried deep breathing and visualization and affirmations and singing and smiling and God knows how many psychological tricks that are supposed to work. I guess some of them worked (though visualization and affirmations, like bullet journaling, works for me about as well as jumping rope works for Bigfoot) but none of them worked for very long.
And this past 15 months? Yeah. Whatever Bluebird of Happiness was supposed to perch on my window ran into the power lines, got hit by a meteor, mugged by a biker gang, eaten by a wolverine, and burped out on the parking lot. Then got COVID.
Sorry, bird. It wasn't your year.
I"m not looking to be happy every day, all the time, either. I don't want to swan about like Snow White pre-apple, singing to the birds and squirrels and orangutans and breakfast cereals and fruit bats. There is a difference between being happy, feeling settled and content and good where you are when you are, and being The Joker. I don't want to be The Joker, the laughing fool, the raving glee machine. I just want to feel...right. Content. Like I'm doing the thing I should be doing in the place I should be doing it. And I don't. I'm not. Probably.
Clearly, I'm not in the least bit qualified to give you any advice for how to be happy or even what causes happiness. Let me tell you what I know:
1) Happiness is hard to get and keep because happiness is not the default human condition.
2) Happiness is meant to be enjoyed thoroughly when you have it, like an ice cream cone in late August.
3) Nobody really knows how to be happy all the time; we're all just figuring out what works for us and that crap changes often enough that we have to keep figuring it out.
I hope that doesn't sound too bleak, because I don't mean it to be. I think we can find happiness, but that third point seems to me the most important. Happiness is individual. Only you know what fills your heart with warm contentment and your face break out into a grin when you think no one's watching. Only you know what work doesn't leave you feeling like a hamster on a wheel. Only you know what makes the long day feel worth it when you get to bedtime. Finding happiness is a daily hunt, and the places you find it aren't necessarily the places where I'll find it.
But you do have to go on that daily hunt. Happiness isn't passive. You don't stumble into happy. You don't trip and land in a face full of happiness any more than you trip and land in a loving and devoted relationship. And there's the other thing. The popular portrayal of happiness is deceptive. Movies, television shows, books, and music tend to tell us that happiness is just one fortunate meeting away or in accepting your here and now even if you're not quite sure your here and now is the here and now you even want. They tell us happiness is the absence of pain or work or even strife. None of that is true and we make ourselves even more miserable believing it is.
The Apostle Paul wrote something I consider pretty amazing to a group of Christians in the city of Philippi, Greece. They had been in the habit of sending stuff to him to help him on his journeys -- money or clothing or little comforts. For a little bit, though, they hadn't. Paul was grateful to them for what they had done and let them know they needn't feel bad because they hadn't had the opportunity to do more. He told them, essentially, they needn't worry that he'd be disappointed or sad because he had learned, no matter what he was going through, to be content. He told them he had known good times and bad times, humiliations and acclaim, fat days and lean. His focus, though, wasn't on the present moment but on the bigger picture and his abiding faith in Jesus. Not to lean hard into religion here, but I think there's a big lesson there. Paul went through a LOT. There is a passage in a letter he wrote to a church in Corinth (also Greece) in which he detailed exactly how much he had gone through. He detailed beatings, sanctioned and by angry mobs, and other amazing mistreatments and disasters that I'm sure would have sidelined me forever. I'd have quit. Paul didn't quit because he had learned that what happened to him today was not necessarily destined to happen to him tomorrow and he had great faith that he was doing what he needed to do, where he needed to do it.
I think there is something useful there for you and me. I don't know the secret to happiness. I do know happiness isn't something I can hold and hoard, nor is it something I can summon like Thor summons Mjölnir in the movies. I do know that even if I'm not happy now, that doesn't mean I can't be happy one minute from now. I do know that I can pull my view from my own unhappiness and put it on something or someone else -- God, my wife, the cashier ringing up my thrift store purchase, the driver who needs a space in the lane I'm in. I can do something they might like, something that will bring them a little joy, and maybe that joy will shine on me a little bit, too.
Which leads me to a little creative thing I started Tuesday morning on my Instagram account. I wrote down a few things I thought might make me happy if I did them and posted the list. They are simple things (well, except for the one involving the chickens) and there's no harm in trying any of them (again, except for the one involving the chickens). Maybe they work and maybe they don't. I suspect they will because I tried to think of things that might make me smile if I did them. If they make me smile, there's a fair chance they'll make you smile. Remember, I'm not a naturally-happy guy, right? I'm going to keep on doing those posts and trying some of the things as I have the opportunity. I'm hoping for good results. But even if they don't give me exactly what I want, I figure I'll have a little bit of fun coming up with them regularly. And fun is pretty close to happy, don't you think?
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What I Wrote and Read Last Week
When you mix math, magic, and the corpse of a long-dead President, you get "To Live and Die in a Lecture Hall".
When you try to "Become Like the Water", who knows what might happen (this is a story from last year I thought you'd like this week. I'll try hard to get back to more than one new story a week!)
Nothing fancy in my web reading this week but I liked this article on the origin of the Allen wrench and why it's such a pleasure to use.
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Arts and/or Letters, So I Can Look All Smart and Stuff
Three issues ago or so I shared the original version of that picture you may have seen around social media with the woman in bed surrounded by many grinning cats. Well, it's the cats' turn to have a horrible nighttime dream! This is Cat's Nightmare, by Louis Wain, a British artist who worked in the early 1900s and pretty much drew and painted only cats. Wain lived quite an interesting life, if you're interested.
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One Last Thing
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