Habitat for Humanity Global Village Team, Feira Nova , Brazil , October 2012

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 our actions, masters of our fate….Contrary to what we usually believe, moments like these, the best moments in our lives, are not the passive, receptive, relaxing times – although such experiences can also be enjoyable, if we have worked hard to attain them. The best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile. Optimal experience is thus something that we make happen…

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.

-- Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi


Judging from her songs, Aimee Mann doesn’t seem like the happiest girl in the whole U.S.A….Therefore it was something of a surprise to find [her] at the Rubin Museum, in Chelsea…offering her views on how to be happy, in a conversation with the playwright Neil LaBute, whose own work isn’t noted for its high spirits, either…
            Mann thought that happiness was only possible if you didn’t pursue it. “You have to be in acceptance,” she said. “Events of life are mostly not personal, and you can’t take it personally.” She added there was no point in asking why certain things happen. “We don’t get to know why.”

“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.

-- John Seabrook in The New Yorker

         

No effort is required to define or even attain happiness, but enormous concentration is needed to abandon everything else.

-- Quentin Crisp

What’s the use of happiness? It can’t buy you money.

-- Henny Youngman