Define Happiness
There are a number of ways to approach the question: how are you?
My reflex is a matter-of-fact 'good!' that elicits a surprised 'whoa, that was quick' retort from my best friends. When cornered with such a personal question, one we probably either don't ponder enough or ponder so much the state of your mind is less explored than the precision of your scrutiny, what reflex do you resort to? Is it the easy 'good' that you won't question, a mere initiation to the conversation about to be crafted? Or do you favor blunt despondency, you opportunist, you, and list off your ailments of the week, be it head, body, or both? Or, for those present and impervious to impulse, do you wonder, and ponder, and answer truthfully?
Lately the quality of my happiness has fallen into question. By me. And 'quality of' serves an important qualification: I am a happy person, who sometimes wallows in bouts of geniality. To continue, then, happiness as I understood it defies definition, because it is so often trumped by a greater happiness. That is to say, what you once thought happy was, is only level 2 on a scale that now goes to 10 but could unravel further as the years wear on. (Sidenote: the opposite of this, the misery scale, tops out around age 14 and we steadily move down until wallowing in adult angst means nothing close to the end of the world. By that time we know the world cares nothing for us, and most people don't remember our name after meeting us. Oh I'm joking.)
In my correspondence, in daily life, I've sensed a rift between the ease of frivolity and its authenticity. Meaning, I'm always affable, yet I'm not always aware when that's just reflex. However, if the action of smiling triggers nerve impulses that generate actual good feelings, couldn't the character of happy, as an act, prevent melancholy? Heh, this, dear reader, would be a good example of the precise scrutiny taking over the original question.
And so, the awkward question. In the Lonely Planet USA guide, a few do's and don't's are offered to aid the foreign traveler in social situations stateside. One of the first is, be positive when asked "how are you?" Americans will ask, but will be surprised if you say anything beyond "good, thank you." This speaks volumes of our sympathy, and of our self-pity. Looking out the window at flurries of snow, in this easy life of mine, I am not burdened, and am aware that my characteristic ebullience on the trail was fleeting, like New England snow this year. Happiness, as I knew it just three years ago, well, this is it! Now I am hooked on that greater stuff, the lingering moments of elation after a rough day of hiking, once the boots are off. The mojo propelling you up a mountain as an endorphin buzz composes plans for a propitious future. The warmth of sharing love with friends who never shirk from honest expression. Or, what Rolf Potts describes as the "narcotic tingle of possibility" (Vagabonding), a phenomenon I had only known as when you think about winning the lottery and what you would do with the money and then for that split second forget that you haven't won yet. Now I know it as the surge in excitement when planning the next adventure, when you know you can make it happen, when the future opens into a great blank canvas, and anything is possible. That happiness.
So how to make it last? Does it ever really last? I remember days on the trail when I was nervous about a mountain, or about a fellow hiker's feelings about me, or the difficulty of hiking after a bad night's sleep, and I remember plenty of moments during those days when a good view or a smile or a special dinner could turn it all around. String along hours of easy daydreams and passive appreciations as miles of beautiful trail are walked, bind them together with salient moments of triumph or frustration, and with alert reflections on contentment or jubilation, and this describes the experience of happiness. Is it zen detachment? No. Is it a constant euphoria so powerful that little else can be accomplished besides recognition of said euphoria? No. Somewhere in between, in retrospect, it's all happy. I'm amnesic about the pain. My memory neglects the woeful obstacles all eventually sorted out. Lasting happiness as composite recollection.
The problem with this experiential definition is whether it can be applied to instruct in other conditions. We would have to deconstruct the trail life piece by piece to find which are responsible, which are building blocks of happiness. And we would fail, because we treasure the trail life as much for what is absent as what is around us. John Muir called the people stuck in capitalist doldrums "time-poor," carrying heavy coats that burden the journey instead of mitigating, what? its rawness, its immediacy? its caprice? I talked a lot about the rush of city life, the ubiquitous pressure to feel that you are late and behind, that you haven't checked off enough things on your list, that the car or person in front of you is holding you up... sound familiar? I went on the trail to walk that out of me. It worked. So now, what do I do surrounded by it again? Will it keep me from sustaining a new happiness? Can anything do that besides my own resolve? I don't know. But the news I hear from thru-hikers is a lot of missing the trail, and the only ones reporting regularly smiling faces are the occupied ones, working towards accomplishing something of pride and merit.
Therefore, my only option is deconstructing the two lifestyles to find possible parallels. Like George Clooney's character in Up In The Air, I thrill at the prospect of successfully keeping everything I need in a backpack. In the great words of Tyler Durden, "the things you own end up owning you." So I purge stuff. I practice disconnect: even a calm life is full off-trail, so I mindfully choose what to care about. It gets easier as days go on. I try to do fewer things every day- not necessarily sitting around like a turd drying on the couch but choosing a few activities to give my all to- and do them without distraction or multitasking. The most obvious parallel is the one I struggle with most, because it is so close and yet I'm ill-prepared. Outside. It's beside me, I am not in it. After all this rambling, I know this: I walk out into the woods, find some quiet, lie back onto the Styrofoam snow, and absorb that quiet calm. All I needed was winter boots.
This exercise grew out of a night of discontent. A few days ago I wanted to explore why I couldn't feel like I did on the trail. And it was a silly thing to read over when I woke up, because obviously I cannot feel the same living in a house. But something about the exercise lingered in my mind, like a challenge: how can I characterize happiness, when it is as diverse and subjective as the people experiencing or missing it? Obviously a futile process, it is the process that sheds light on the subject. We all know, the journey is the destination. I won't seek happiness, I will craft a lifestyle more conducive to calm and quiet and climbing mountains. Pretty simple really.
My reflex is a matter-of-fact 'good!' that elicits a surprised 'whoa, that was quick' retort from my best friends. When cornered with such a personal question, one we probably either don't ponder enough or ponder so much the state of your mind is less explored than the precision of your scrutiny, what reflex do you resort to? Is it the easy 'good' that you won't question, a mere initiation to the conversation about to be crafted? Or do you favor blunt despondency, you opportunist, you, and list off your ailments of the week, be it head, body, or both? Or, for those present and impervious to impulse, do you wonder, and ponder, and answer truthfully?
Lately the quality of my happiness has fallen into question. By me. And 'quality of' serves an important qualification: I am a happy person, who sometimes wallows in bouts of geniality. To continue, then, happiness as I understood it defies definition, because it is so often trumped by a greater happiness. That is to say, what you once thought happy was, is only level 2 on a scale that now goes to 10 but could unravel further as the years wear on. (Sidenote: the opposite of this, the misery scale, tops out around age 14 and we steadily move down until wallowing in adult angst means nothing close to the end of the world. By that time we know the world cares nothing for us, and most people don't remember our name after meeting us. Oh I'm joking.)
In my correspondence, in daily life, I've sensed a rift between the ease of frivolity and its authenticity. Meaning, I'm always affable, yet I'm not always aware when that's just reflex. However, if the action of smiling triggers nerve impulses that generate actual good feelings, couldn't the character of happy, as an act, prevent melancholy? Heh, this, dear reader, would be a good example of the precise scrutiny taking over the original question.
And so, the awkward question. In the Lonely Planet USA guide, a few do's and don't's are offered to aid the foreign traveler in social situations stateside. One of the first is, be positive when asked "how are you?" Americans will ask, but will be surprised if you say anything beyond "good, thank you." This speaks volumes of our sympathy, and of our self-pity. Looking out the window at flurries of snow, in this easy life of mine, I am not burdened, and am aware that my characteristic ebullience on the trail was fleeting, like New England snow this year. Happiness, as I knew it just three years ago, well, this is it! Now I am hooked on that greater stuff, the lingering moments of elation after a rough day of hiking, once the boots are off. The mojo propelling you up a mountain as an endorphin buzz composes plans for a propitious future. The warmth of sharing love with friends who never shirk from honest expression. Or, what Rolf Potts describes as the "narcotic tingle of possibility" (Vagabonding), a phenomenon I had only known as when you think about winning the lottery and what you would do with the money and then for that split second forget that you haven't won yet. Now I know it as the surge in excitement when planning the next adventure, when you know you can make it happen, when the future opens into a great blank canvas, and anything is possible. That happiness.
So how to make it last? Does it ever really last? I remember days on the trail when I was nervous about a mountain, or about a fellow hiker's feelings about me, or the difficulty of hiking after a bad night's sleep, and I remember plenty of moments during those days when a good view or a smile or a special dinner could turn it all around. String along hours of easy daydreams and passive appreciations as miles of beautiful trail are walked, bind them together with salient moments of triumph or frustration, and with alert reflections on contentment or jubilation, and this describes the experience of happiness. Is it zen detachment? No. Is it a constant euphoria so powerful that little else can be accomplished besides recognition of said euphoria? No. Somewhere in between, in retrospect, it's all happy. I'm amnesic about the pain. My memory neglects the woeful obstacles all eventually sorted out. Lasting happiness as composite recollection.
The problem with this experiential definition is whether it can be applied to instruct in other conditions. We would have to deconstruct the trail life piece by piece to find which are responsible, which are building blocks of happiness. And we would fail, because we treasure the trail life as much for what is absent as what is around us. John Muir called the people stuck in capitalist doldrums "time-poor," carrying heavy coats that burden the journey instead of mitigating, what? its rawness, its immediacy? its caprice? I talked a lot about the rush of city life, the ubiquitous pressure to feel that you are late and behind, that you haven't checked off enough things on your list, that the car or person in front of you is holding you up... sound familiar? I went on the trail to walk that out of me. It worked. So now, what do I do surrounded by it again? Will it keep me from sustaining a new happiness? Can anything do that besides my own resolve? I don't know. But the news I hear from thru-hikers is a lot of missing the trail, and the only ones reporting regularly smiling faces are the occupied ones, working towards accomplishing something of pride and merit.
Therefore, my only option is deconstructing the two lifestyles to find possible parallels. Like George Clooney's character in Up In The Air, I thrill at the prospect of successfully keeping everything I need in a backpack. In the great words of Tyler Durden, "the things you own end up owning you." So I purge stuff. I practice disconnect: even a calm life is full off-trail, so I mindfully choose what to care about. It gets easier as days go on. I try to do fewer things every day- not necessarily sitting around like a turd drying on the couch but choosing a few activities to give my all to- and do them without distraction or multitasking. The most obvious parallel is the one I struggle with most, because it is so close and yet I'm ill-prepared. Outside. It's beside me, I am not in it. After all this rambling, I know this: I walk out into the woods, find some quiet, lie back onto the Styrofoam snow, and absorb that quiet calm. All I needed was winter boots.
This exercise grew out of a night of discontent. A few days ago I wanted to explore why I couldn't feel like I did on the trail. And it was a silly thing to read over when I woke up, because obviously I cannot feel the same living in a house. But something about the exercise lingered in my mind, like a challenge: how can I characterize happiness, when it is as diverse and subjective as the people experiencing or missing it? Obviously a futile process, it is the process that sheds light on the subject. We all know, the journey is the destination. I won't seek happiness, I will craft a lifestyle more conducive to calm and quiet and climbing mountains. Pretty simple really.
posted by Sara Haxby at
1:10 AM
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