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Habitat
for Humanity Global Village Team, HAPPINESS Happiness
is not something that happens. It is not the result of good
fortune or random chance. It is not something that money can
buy or power command. It does not depend on outside events,
but, rather, on how we interpret them. Happiness, in fact, is
a condition that must be prepared for, cultivated, and
defended privately by each person. People who learn to control
inner experience will be able to determine the quality of
their lives, which is as close as any of us can come to being
happy. Yet
we cannot reach happiness by consciously searching for it.
“Ask yourself whether you are happy,” said John Stuart
Mill, “and you cease to be so.” It is by being fully
involved with every detail of our lives, whether good or bad,
that we find happiness, not by trying to look for it directly.
Viktor Frankl, the Austrian psychologist, summarized it
beautifully in the preface to his book Man’s
Search for Meaning: “Don’t aim at success – the more
you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to
miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it
must ensue…as the unintended side effect of one’s personal
dedication to a cause greater than oneself.” So
how can we reach this elusive goal that cannot be attained by
a direct route? My studies of the past quarter century have
convinced me that there is a way. It is a circuitous path that
begins with achieving control over the contents of our
consciousness. Our
perceptions about our lives are the outcome of many forces
that shape experience, each having an impact on whether we
feel good or bad. Most of these forces are outside our
control…Yet we have all experienced times when, instead of
being buffeted by anonymous forces, we do feel in control of Such
experiences are not necessarily pleasant at the time they
occur. The swimmer’s muscles might have ached during his
most memorable race, his lungs might have felt like exploding,
and he might have been dizzy with fatigue – yet these could
have been the best moments of his life. Getting control of
life is never easy, and sometimes it can be definitely
painful. But in the long run optimal experiences add up to a
sense of mastery – or, perhaps better, a sense of participation
in determining the content of life – that comes as close to
what is usually meant by happiness as anything else we can
conceivably imagine. “Is
there a place where you find yourself happier?” LaBute
asked. “Zabar’s?” Mann
said that happiness had to be internal. “Looking to outside
sources to make you happy is just a disaster,” she said. For
instance, “It’s perfectly possible to play a show and have
it go well and be miserable.” She mentioned something she
had heard at a twelve-step meeting. “I’m not going to make
being cool my higher power anymore.” LaBute
wondered whether it was asking too little of life “when you
set the bar here” – he held his hand six inches from the
floor. Mann said that she would take being bland over panic.
“Having twenty-hour-hour-a-day panic attacks is no fucking
fun.” She said she was willing to give up “this idea of
being edgy and cool and dark and brooding.” As far as
expectations go, “I just wish my guitar would stay in
tune.” She
also said, “If I have an impulse to help someone, it’s
usually in some kind of obsessive way that is rescue-y and is
probably not very helpful and probably has more to do with me
wanting to feel a certain way about myself.” That sounded
like an Aimee Mann lyric in the making. -- Henny
Youngman
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