Spiritual Sundays: Happiness

The day of spiritual things *****

I’ve been thinking about this elusive state of happiness.

I would say it’s the greatest treasure that people seek. Even beyond wealth, health, love, power, adventure, beauty, youth, and comfort.

We believe we can find happiness through those things. It’s why we aspire to those things because they promise the ultimate - happiness. We don’t purposely seek things that we know would make us unhappy.

And to be sure, it’s hard to be happy if you’re alone, homeless, sick, and hungry. There are basic needs to be met to obtain happiness.

But beyond that, people in spite of all the things they may acquire, often still search for happiness.

It strikes me that we are under this illusion that in life we’re supposed to be happy, all the time, in an eternal state of bliss.

But that simply is not possible.

Life is hard. We go through times that suck. We lose loved ones in death. We go through divorces. Our children turn away from us. We can lose everything we built in a single moment by the flame of fire or a natural disaster. We get in serious accidents or become sick. We lose our jobs and can’t find another one.

Bad things happen in life.

And even when bad things don’t happen, and everything is fine, we are still not going to be in a state of perpetual bliss.

And yet we’re sold on this idea that we must always be happy. And we take drugs, or drink, or go through unnecessary surgeries, and modify our bodies, and spend money we don’t have on things we don’t need, and cling onto toxic relationships or give up on good ones that seem stagnant, or create chaos, or have anonymous sex, or do anything we can think of to find that elusive feeling of happiness because being sad or numb feels awful and we’re always supposed to be happy, right?

But here’s the thing. We’re not always supposed to be happy.

We are supposed to feel sad, and angry, and frustrated, and bored, and lost, and alone, and disconnected, and all of those negative emotions.

Not all the time. But a lot of the time.

If we never feel the negative emotions, we never feel the positive ones. We can’t know joy if we’ve never experienced sorrow. There is no light without the dark. No sunrise without the sunset. No feeling of connection if we've never felt loneliness.

A number of years ago just after my very difficult and long marriage ended, I was talking with a relative who was going through a very bad time in her marriage which did also eventually end. She stated, “I don’t believe in romance or love”.

I said, “I do.” And I remember thinking “I’m so grateful for my sorrow, because without it I would never know joy again.” In that moment I was grateful for my sorrow. I know it sounds bizarre, but the thought of feeling nothing, seemed far worse.

Numbness is worse than sadness because numbness has no hope.

Ironically, she’s the one that found love and I haven’t yet.

I could be bitter about that, but I choose not to be.

Certainly, if you are in a perpetual state of depression than something physical is wrong and you need to get help. I am not talking about clinical depression.

But for most of us, we’re not depressed, we’re unhappy. And we believe that happiness is just around the corner if we look inward enough and do those things that are supposed to make us happy.

But what if we’ve done the inward stuff? We exercise and eat right. We do yoga and mediate. We read our scriptures, and inspirational works, and pray to God. We make time to do the things we like to do and we still haven’t found that happiness.

Suicide rates among young people have soared. Why? Why when they have so much are they so unhappy?

My daughter once told me that she thinks her peers are unhappy because of social media. That instead of feeling more connected they feel less connected.

It makes sense. There’s plenty of memes going around of young people gathered together staring at their phones and not connecting with the people right with them.

It used to be that peer pressure was pretty much contained at school and at extracurricular activiites. We hung out with our friends doing things together, not just side by side. We talked to each other, not texted someone else on a device. It may have been stupid talk, but we were connecting. When we went home at night, we were no longer being directly influenced by the world outside. We could relax and be ourselves (unless we had a really bad home life). Now we carry peer pressure and relationships in our pockets, with us at all times. Even when we go to the bathroom or go to sleep at night. It’s always there. We rate ourselves according to how many likes we got, how many followers we have, how many comments we’ve received, what kind of comments we receive.

There was a Black Mirror episode about this. It's become a classic because it's a world just around the corner.

We’re basing our happiness on how others see us.

And we’re careful how we curate ourselves on social media. We tend to go one extreme or the other. There are the people who only have perpetually successful posts. They post happy pictures of family, and announcements about promotions and new houses, and the latest bread they baked, and pictures of meals they cooked and rooms they decorated. It’s all good and positive, but you never see anything that is opinionated, or sad. You scroll by because you can’t handle one more perky post from someone where nothing ever goes wrong. There’s nothing to comment about anyway, other than to give them a like or a heart.

Then there’s the other kind of people who constantly moan and groan about every little thing and how unhappy they are and how life sucks and they ask for advice and when you give it they tell you that they don’t want your advice and to leave them alone. Because all they want is constant assurances that yes, things are hard and poor baby life is so unfair to you and only you and no one else ever has difficulties.

I am not talking about those people who have just gone through something horrible like the death of a spouse. You’re allowed to grieve! This is a time when you’re supposed to be unhappy. And if I can hold your hand somehow on your way through those dark shadows, I will.

Again, sometimes we’re supposed to be unhappy and it’s something we have to bear for awhile because - life. And sometimes happiness is just a state of mind and we can find it right where we're sitting right now, in pizza and sunny days and fresh flowers and the laughter of a friend.

It strikes me as I listen to story after story of unhappy young people trying desperately to not ever feel unhappy, that there’s an overwhelming focus on me, me, me. The world revolves around me. I’m not happy. I’m not fulfilled. I’m all alone. No one understands me. If I change this about me then I will be happy. If I do this then people will like me.

Maybe we’ve focused so much on filling our wells, which is important, that we forgot about what we’re supposed to do with the water in those wells. And I'm guilty of this too.

For whoever desires to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life

for My sake will find it. - Matthew 16:25 KJV

Perhaps if we are hyper-focusing on ourselves, it would be best to lay ourselves to the side and go focus on others needs and their well being. Put aside the way we feel about our bodies and our clothes. Put aside that we may not be good athletes or able to sing. Put aside that we’re having a difficult relationship with our mother. Put aside the financial worries. Put aside our search for happiness. Putting them to the side doesn’t mean that they are forgotten, ignored, or won’t be dealt with. It just means we’ll deal with it later with a fresh perspective, when we’re not wallowing in our self-pity.

We need to empty our wells to have room to fill them up again.

We need to put aside our dark places to hold the hand of someone going through theirs.

And it’s possible that when we return to our dark selves that we put aside, some light will have come through and we can see ourselves and our situations more clearly.

Perhaps we can’t search for happiness and find it. It’s illusive and is determined not to be found.

Perhaps, happiness finds us.