The Pursuit of Happiness
Lone Jensen
We all want
happiness. We want to be at peace, and free from harm. We want to experience
pleasure and we want to love one another. But let me ask you just how happy are
you? Strange isn’t it, how something we pursue so relentlessly can seem so
elusive. Daily we are bombarded with insistent messages promising us earthly
salvation, luxuries and joy on credit, no interest ‘til July of next year or
the Second Coming, whichever comes first. E-mails
promise me an eternally youthful body, will enlarge certain body parts I do not
have, and for a fee will give me perfect credit rating along with earning money
in my spare time at home. Big official looking envelopes tell me I may already
have won one million big ones, if I have the lucky number. Oh, the happy racket
and false promise enterprise is big business.
But happiness
remains elusive. What is it anyhow? What would make you happy? Depends on your
situation doesn’t it? Last night when my computer had a total breakdown and I
lost my first version of this sermon, happiness was getting my text back or at
least re-writing my sermon before
A good thing
to bear in mind,. Especially for those of us who seem
to be born with a bit too much of the dark winter night in our souls. On the
tragic to happy continuum, I fall somewhere around an old black and white
Ingmar Bergman movie with occasional sunlight but lots of dark shadows.. I do serious very well and have upon occasion in the
past, before I learned better, been known to snatch defeat from the jaws of
victory. Martin EP Seligman writes in his book Authentic Happiness:
“Pessimists have a particularly pernicious way of construing their setbacks and
frustrations. They automatically think that the cause is permanent, pervasive
and personal. ‘It’s going to last forever, it’s going to undermine everything,
and it’s my fault.’ He is himself a recovering pessimist. As he waited for a
phone call to see if he had won his association’s presidency he was sure that a
busy signal meant that he had lost the election, And of course it was because
he wasn’t qualified enough, and hadn’t devoted enough time to winning. In
reality he had won.
“Optimists in
contrast have a strength that allows them to interpret their setbacks as
surmountable, particular to a single problem and resulting from temporary
circumstances or other people. “Pessimists are 8 times as likely to become
depressed, they do worse than their talents warrant and they often lose
national elections. For those of you old enough to remember, a good example is
Walter Mondale and his realistic “I will raise your taxes” pessimism, versus
Ronald Reagan’s “morning in
Martin tells
of his conversion experience, his epiphany: “One day I was weeding the garden.
I am goal oriented and time urgent and when I am weeding the garden, I am
weeding. Nikki my daughter was throwing weeds into the air and dancing and
singing. Since she was distracting me I yelled at her and she walked away. But
within a few minutes she was back, saying: ‘Daddy I want to talk to you.’ ‘Yes,
Nikki?’ ‘Daddy do your remember before my fifth birthday? From when I was three
until I was five I was a whiner. I whined every day.
On my fifth birthday I decided wasn’t going to whine anymore. That was the
hardest thing I have ever done. And if I can stop whining you can stop being
such a grouch.’ This was my epiphany. I realized that I had been like cumulus
cloud in a household full of sunshine.”
His task as a
parent was not to point out Nikki’s shortcomings but rather to help her grow
fully into her own strengths – one of which was a remarkable ability to see
clearly into her daddy’s soul.
Social
intelligence is another way of saying that we realize we are not alone in this
world but connected in mystery and wonder to each other and to the immense and truly
wondrous universe.
Can optimism
or happiness be learned? It seems it can to some degree. But we have not given
it its due yet. We do not yet “view positive motivations: loving kindness,
competence, choice and respect for life as being as authentic as the darker
motives.” (Martin EP Seligman)
The problem
with our relentless pursuit of happiness may well be that we are looking for
the wrong kind of pleasure, the passive kind. Research shows that when animals
or people learn that what they do, their actions, have no effect on their
environment, they lapse into a state of passive listlessness. They are not only
depressed, but figure that it is all hopeless anyhow. Even when the experiment
then changes and they can avoid unpleasant stimulus such as electric shock,
they do not even try. They have lost all hope. One of religion’s role is to offer realistic hope. Unitarian Universalism puts
us clearly in charge of our own destinies. We are expected to use our powers,
our talents, for the good to make a difference. Our leap of faith is to say
that each child is born with an inherent goodness that must be nurtured and
brought forth. Call it the battle of original blessing versus original sin.
Pessimists
may be more accurate in their perception, but optimists live longer. It is
really two different ways of seeing the world. A chilly negative mood
“activates the battle station’s mode of thinking: the order of the day is to
find out what is wrong and eliminate it. A positive mood brings people into a
mode of thinking that is creative, tolerant, constructive, generous,
un-defensive, and lateral. “We look for what is right not what is wrong.”
One of
Seligman’s findings was a bit of a surprise to me. Happy people are more
altruistic and generous. They focus less on themselves, like others more, and
want to share their good fortune. I can see how it makes sense though. When we
are down, we trust others and life less. We turn inward in defense and focus on
our own needs. Looking out for number one comes from a place of a deep distrust
and unhappiness.
There are of
course many levels of happiness. A simple pleasure a hot bath after a walk in
chilly rain does not require much of us except to be present and say: Ah!
But look at
your past and you’re are in control. What tinted glasses
do you see your past with? If we hold on to ancient wrongs we stay stuck and
frozen. A woman who, 20 years after her divorce still bristles with anger about
her ex-husband who is not in her life anymore, sees her world through the
poison green glasses of betrayal. Contrary to Freud our past does not determine
our future. We are not helpless victims of our childhood. We can chose to see the world differently. It has to do again with
our focus. If it is on our self then we may take someone’s silence as rejection
when in fact he may really just be tired. Forgiving is important because it
sets us free. Besides, as Bernhard Shaw said: “Forgive your
enemies it will drive them crazy.”
For the
science conscious among you, Seligman has an actual formula for happiness. It
is H=S=C=V. H is the enduring level of happiness. S is your set range: are you
born an optimist or a pessimist. C are the current
circumstances of your life and V is events over which you do have control. So
your enduring level of happiness depends upon your genes, your circumstances
and your sense of control.
Momentary
happiness is easy to increase but such pleasures, though we can savor them and strive to be present to them, are not permanent. Over time
they lose their flavor. The second glass of wine is never as sweet as the
first. The first spoonful of ice cream is the most delicious. When we try to
recapture that initial pleasure we hop onto the hedonists’ thread mill: we want
more and better and faster, etc. How about money? Ruth won the lottery. On year
later she was diagnosed with chronic depression. Why? She now had everything
society had told her would make her happy and after a while she found that the
grand mansion, the fancy car, the designer wardrobe, none of it ultimately
touched or nurtured her soul. None gave her enduring happiness. So much in our
culture’s relentless pursuit of happiness is passive. Sit and watch. Eat and
watch. Drink and watch. Passive entertainment unlike art that engages, leaves us somehow depleted. We want another better,
stronger, more exciting fix. Our children are so immersed in this culture of
pleasure fixes. What we need to teach them and ourselves is how to achieve
enduring happiness. And there are ways to raise your set point. Old sayings
turn out to be true. Count your blessings and develop an attitude of gratitude.
Write down what is good in your life, focus on it and give thanks to God, or to
the Universe or fate, why maybe even to your parents! Where did you get that
curly hair anyhow? Or those brown eyes or that infectious laughter or that love
of learning? Happiness is written into our declaration of independence as an
inalienable right: Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. But what kind
of happiness did they have in mind? Probably not French
fries. In English we have too few words for very complex emotions.
Martin suggests that we use gratifications versus pleasures. The sound of rain
on a tin roof is pure pleasure but drumming out a tune, lost in the rhythm and
motion, is gratifying. It does not necessarily come easy. It comes close to
being in the flow or what religious people call grace. You forget about time
for that one moment of joy in doing. It is what Aristotle called activity
consonant with a higher purpose. Enduring pleasure has to do with enacting
personal strengths and virtues. Which are going to be different for each of us. It is what we were born to do. It is our essence.
Imagine a horse running over an open field with its mane flowing in the wind,
graceful, quick, secure, the very essence of what a horse is. Meister Eckhart,
a medieval mystic, called this “being your truest self, the essence of God.” So
do go with your bliss, go with your strength. It will lead you to your greatest
joy. Writers lose track of time, scientists stay in the lab till morning,
parents play or read. Chefs cook, accountants count, teachers teach. It is not
what you do but that you can make of it a calling.
What is wrong
with our relentless pursuit of happiness is not the pleasure, itself. It is
that it is seductively easy, passive, and asks very little of us. If we chose
such empty pleasures over the deeper joys we deaden our soul. Eye candy teaches
us to be passive, to be helpless, and far less than we are worth.
Escape is
tempting. We live in anxious, difficult, and dangerous times. But this is where
our religion comes in. Hope is what we offer, hope and a place to find your
life’s meaning in a caring community. You think these times are hard? Julian of
Norwich, a twelfth century mystic, wrote these words as the Black Plague was
decimating one third of
The Buddhist
answer as written by the Dalai Lama is a reminder that our isolation and
separateness are ultimately illusions.
“If the self
had an intrinsic identity it would be possible to speak in terms of self
interest in isolation from that of others. But because it is not so because
others can only be understood in terms of relationship we see that self
interest and that of others are closely interrelated.”
Happiness is
relative. Right now happiness would be for me to no longer have the bronchitis
I have had for the past two weeks. Once I am free of this cough my definition
will change. It would be gratifying and a much deeper joy to do ministry well,
to help us together become the best congregation we possibly can be. We have so
many talents, strengths and possibilities. If we decide to buy this bigger
church we will have the space we need to grow into a more active, socially
conscious church and no longer have to turn people away at the door or lose
them because they can‘t find a place to park. Will a new building bring us
happiness? Well for a little while it might. But it is the vision of what this
space makes possible that excites me the most.
It is a
vision of what we might become.