Happiness
There are many stars in the sky, and yet we look to the North Star first to guide the way. The North Star is constant in its position all night long, neither rising nor setting because it is so closely positioned to the North Pole (also known as Santa’s home for those who believe!). It is also bright and twinkling, attractive and easily visible in the night sky. This cosmic phenomenon can serve as a metaphor for happiness. When we are honest with ourselves, and find compassion and value in our uniqueness, we allow ourselves to look toward happiness for guidance. We recall how brightly it shines, how much delight it brings, and we scan the celestial canopy of emotions we draw out of ourselves, searching for a way toward more of those moments where there is happiness.
Belief systems can get complicated and befuddled. There is a deep-seated ideology extolling the puritan virtues of hard work and sacrifice on the one hand, while on the other hand, simple pleasures are the gifts that gently brighten our lives. Simple pleasures open doorways to authentic happiness, which tends to be a very pure and straightforward sensation of deep contentment. It is a restfulness we experience when poised in aligning the best of our internal selves with a congruence of our external surroundings. These subtle slices of holistic constancy show up often unexpectedly and usually briefly to guide humans in their personal journeys.
Perhaps one of the most powerful attestations confirming the importance of happiness was that which was written into the Declaration of Independence. It was part of a thought experiment, a conceptualization made by a bunch of dissatisfied revolutionaries someday to be recognized as the founding fathers of the United States over two hundred years ago. In the document, the founding fathers sought to define a new structure of governance, one which supported rather than oppressed its people. The idea of inalienable rights — certain characteristics recognized in all people to which social institutions had an obligation of protection — included the three basic examples of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Life and liberty are quite tangible. There is a general acceptance that taking the life of another being is wrong, as is interfering with the activity of another being when they go about their daily activities. The failures of protecting life and liberty — causing death and imprisonment — are specific and objective.
The pursuit of happiness is more ephemeral. Happiness is akin to the stuff of which dreams are made. Happiness may have a universal theme but paradoxically, it comes attached to the delivery of a very individual package. Happiness shows up differently from person to person. This makes quantifying the outcome of happiness correspondingly difficult. Therefore, when happiness is removed, quantifying what is lost is even more difficult. Losing happiness can put a person at many points across an emotional spectrum, from the gray humdrum of lack to dark despair, or even sideways into deeply rooted, painful sorrow. Perhaps the intangibility of happiness was reason enough to step back and address its universality. The authors of the Declaration of Independence only conceded the importance of the right to pursue happiness as being inalienable for all humans. Holding onto it wasn’t within the purview of protection.
However, if the pursuit of happiness is understood as a fundamental right, finding happiness becomes by extension, an individual responsibility. It is there if we can find our way to claim it. It lives in those special moments when physical and emotional circumstances fall simultaneously into a place where we exist in beauty.
Happiness comes from within but it is also created by circumstances without. There is a certain irony in the founding fathers’ recognition of the pursuit of happiness in that at the time of the Declaration of Independence, many people were excluded from its provisions. As inalienable as the rights of life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness were for the authors, they weren’t meant for poor people, people of color, and women.
The tension between the idealistic vision and the reality of giving birth to a brave, new nation whose genetic material came out of its European traditions has continued over the centuries. Every once in a while, a moment of awareness results in a recalibration and balancing of the clashing forces of our culture. The nineteen-sixties and early seventies was a more recent example in which human dignity and the right to pursue happiness was addressed. Coming through the pandemic has opened several fissures in “the way things are,” and the light is shining through the cracks.
Poverty on several fronts (homelessness, food scarcity, student debt and strategies of hierarchy supported by academic institutions for next-generation educators, etc.) has come into question. Issues of freedom and diversity have been raised with professional representation of true demographics and Black Lives Matter. Women have fought to be heard with Me Too as they gain greater economic independence while still battling for sexual autonomy and reproductive rights. Thanksgiving is also Indigenous Peoples’ Day. These changes have been led — as they have so often in the past — from the ground up. Most people live on the less equitable end of the wealth and power spectrum. Happiness can be harder to pursue when there are fewer resources. However, when people join together, when they can find solidarity in the agreement of human rights, that’s when change begins.
Believing in the inherent rights of life, liberty, and perhaps most significantly for all its indefinable complexity, the pursuit of happiness is a highly combustible material stoking the flames of revolution and the forward impetus of human progress. We’ve seen examples of this rising-above-challenges philosophy time and again throughout history. Undervaluing the importance of fundamental human rights hasn’t ended well for any regime over the long term.
Turning from the big-picture concept of the pursuit of happiness to the building blocks of individual action acknowledges the importance of integrity to the details. All of us, as human beings, have the right to concern ourselves with the notion of striving to be happy, and each of us has the obligation to determine what happiness truly means independently of others’ prescriptions. That is no easy task. It requires a degree of mental wellness that may not naturally flow our way as a part of growing up. We may have to work actively toward understanding ourselves and accepting who we are.
Mental health is the new frontier of the twenty-first century. This field has the potential to support and advance humans’ happiness. With this potential comes a price tag. Mental health can also illuminate the disparities of our social, political, and natural environments impeding our chances for happiness. Mental health eyes the reduction of disparities as a way to distribute the forces of social hierarchy and interpersonal power more evenly. The field of mental health is tied closely to social justice, and how far one or the other advances will affect the other. Because human beings seem to consistently have a need to give power and control to a few, there may be a limitation on how far we progress in our quest for wellness. Perhaps, as is the saying in recovery circles, “progress not perfection” is a more reasonable and achievably goal.
The stuff of dreams remains. Following the course of the North Star of our happiness helps us discover who we are and where we are meant to go. The way may be full of darkness, vast and wide, and we stumble where we have no lanterns to shine light upon the ground. At times, happiness will seem many light years away — so far away, it may seem a trick of perception. We won’t know if we can see the star in time before something happens in the distant galaxy, and it goes away. Yet the thought of reaching happiness carries us onward. We have to act on trust and we have to rely on ourselves to navigate our separate treks even as we move toward the same destination, the confluent theme of well-lived life.
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