How to Find Happiness?
“Happiness is not a station you arrive at but a manner of travelling.” This very perceptive remark, made by Margaret Lee Runbeck, is worth turning over in the mind, for so many of us think of happiness as a destination which we must reach sooner or later, provided that we just make sufficient efforts to do so. Yet consistent effort to produce happiness so often ends in failure. We think if we acquire enough wealth, heap up possessions, dress stylishly, have a large circle of friends, make interesting trips and so on and so forth, we shall necessarily be happy, but more often than one might imagine, all this is accompanied by a feeling of unease, of inadequacy, even of despair. It is because we have made the mistake of thinking of happiness as the sum of a series of different types of pleasures and, as such, something to be set up as a goal and striven towards. But the more we hurl ourselves at this objective, the further it seems to recede from our grasp. There is also the view that happiness can be attained by avoidance of difficulties, responsibilities and unpleasantness of all kinds. But this negative approach yields no better results than a frantic scrabbling after pleasures. The strangest aspect of this problem is that it is mostly people who never think of their own happiness who achieve the most enviable state of contentment. These others who find that happiness has come to them quite unexpectedly are those who have made up their minds to do without happiness, and to devote themselves to worthwhile tasks without expecting any particular reward. Often such activities yield great happiness without that ever having been their objective.
Happiness is indeed an extremely elusive mental state. Let us suppose that we seem fated never to be happy, because perhaps we are forced to live in conditions of great deprivation or adversity. The best way to deal with this situation is simply to accept it, and then to consider what its positive aspects could possibly be. Firstly, our being able to accept such a situation shows a strengthening of the mind and a firming up of the character. Then the process we go through to overcome each difficulty in turn is like the successive fine-honing of tempered steel, or the burnishing of base metal until it shines like gold. When we forget about happiness and apply ourselves to the task in hand, we elevate ourselves to a superior plane of human existence, and it is often at that point, when we least expect it, that we find that happiness is ours.
To expect happiness to be a continuing state, however, is to indulge in illusions. It is something which can come and go, for no rhyme or reason, and constant preoccupation with one’s state of unhappiness is likely to plunge one even deeper into despair. The absence of happiness, should be accepted, ignored or treated as something to be turned to positive account as a matter of experience. It should never be allowed to make one bitter. It should be considered that if a state of happiness does not last forever, neither does a state of unhappiness. The worst error to fall into is to become preoccupied with one’s own happiness to the exclusion of all else. It is more often in giving one’s mind, one’s affection, one’s attention, one’s resources—one’s very life—to others, that one finds true happiness.
