The Nature of Happiness

The Nature of Happiness

What do you fear? What do you want from life? What will make you happy?

What we anticipate life giving or throwing at us determines the posture we take towards it. If life throws us a bone and we aren’t looking because we are anticipating something else, we probably won’t catch it. Whether we realize it on not, we are postured to defend against certain fears, and will waste a lot of time and energy being on edge to fight it if it never comes.

In wrestling or marital arts there is a saying, “where the head goes the body will follow.” Cognitive behavioral therapy says the same goes for affect, “where the head goes the emotions will follow.”

When you are fighting someone, they will take a stance against you anticipating which way you will try to push or pull them, and the goal is to do the opposite. Reality is infinitely complex, and with our finite capacity to grasp it, perception is more something we wrestle with than something we just see. Therefore in this wrestle with reality, we must choose a stance.

There is a quote from a satirical cartoon, “Smart people get a chance to climb on top, take reality for a ride, but it'll never stop trying to throw you. And eventually, it will.”

In sumo wrestling the art is misdirect of the other person’s momentum. If we keep getting thrown into the same corner of the wrestling ring, maybe our momentum is always in the same direction, and reality is redirecting it the same way each time.

There is a constant battle at grocery stores, because children like to touch things first and then look at them, and parents want them to only touch what they are going to buy. So much of what we want most, are things we don’t know, because we don’t really know something until we have it.  Once we have something, the associated responsibilities with the thing become painfully present, while the fantasy we projected onto the thing before we obtained it becomes anticlimactically absent.  

If we look at the addition of responsibility and disappearance of the fantastical to be bad, then the anticipation of a thing would be better than the thing itself. Oddly enough, it is not only possible but very common to try and hopefully anticipate something and dread the actual obtaining of it.

Something interesting happens when we try to stop desiring what we don’t have, first we realize that we don’t die when we stifle our craving for things we don’t understand, and then we start to realize what we already have. I don’t mean this in a sense of just being grateful, but in understanding the formula for happiness. From birth we are inculcated with the idea that happiness is achieved by obtaining something outside of ourselves and integrating it in us, under the assumption that we have a hole in us that can be filled with something outside of us. It doesn’t matter what we think can fill the hole, because the emptiness we feel, is what spills out of our full cup when we try to put more in it. We assume that our cup is empty, or at best half full, and then when we try to fill it, we don’t notice, but it overflows, and what pours our first is the cream on top. Whether it is coffee, hot chocolate or whatever, the cream is there, and all we have to do is stir it in, not try to add more to it.

There is a formula I found that I have applied whenever I am overwhelmed or disappointed, and that is, “If ___ just ____, then I would be happy.”

Is it really something someone else needs to change so we can be happy? What are we really missing that is the key to our happiness?

What makes us happy, and what we excitedly want to share, is what we have overcome. Being born into a rich family doesn’t make us happy. What we have given to us we usually take for granted. It is what we work for that we are proud of. I didn’t appreciate the luxury of drinkable water until I lived out of the country for a while. I definitely prefer not having to carry a five gallon bottle of water home from the water store down the road, but I did experience a sense of contentment that I was strong enough to do it while I was carrying it. This was because I knew the strength I was building carry the water would help in other ventures.

It is no coincidence that the first Olympic games were held in 776 bc, and by 753 bc Roman ruled most of the known world. The Olympic games were to increase the athleticism of the warriors in non-war time, and it worked. If you want to be good at fighting, if fighting is the only way you practice, you will probably spend a lot of your time hurt—that is why boxers, wrestlers and martial artists spend the bulk of their time doing other things that indirectly benefit their ability to fight. In the case of Rome, each battle may have won them gold, but once the gold had been used, what they learned from the fight would help them in the next fight.

The responsibility is the lasting part of each thing. You buy a horse, learn how to care for it and ride it, and then it dies. Yes, it would be nice if the horse could live forever, but that horse will live on in all you learned through becoming responsible for it. Owning a horse, among many other things, you quickly learn what spooks a horse and become more skilled at avoiding those triggers, making the ride better for you and the experience better for the horse. This realization that we are all not scared of the same things, and that what scares some people may be irrational, but to make the experience better for everyone we can be better at seeing those triggers coming and steering away from them.

When we make money, fame, or power the focus, all the responsibility revolves around shady things, like learning the art of deception and propaganda. Owning the horse where we learn things that will help us in many other meaningful parts of our lives. Learning the art of business teaches us a lot of bad ideas and skills, like “buy low sell high,” and “perception is reality.”

Since actually having something means understanding and holding the responsibility of it, do we really have ourselves? If we don’t take responsibility for ourselves, then no, we don’t. Pretending that we are willing to take whatever responsibility accompanies what we fantasize about having, is no more than a pipe dream if we aren’t even willing to take responsibility for ourselves which we think we already have.

Once we actually take full responsibility for ourselves, we find that everything we needed or wanted was inside us. We think we own ourselves, but it is society or circumstance that own us until we take the responsibility for our happiness off them and on us.

If we feel life or reality has been throwing us around, what part of our stance towards it is it exploiting? What are we anticipating against or for?

Each story has a hero, and it is someone on an adventure to find truth and meaning, whether or not they know that on the onset of their journey or not. The hero stumbles into a responsibility they should take, and make it a game to tackle it. We are programmed for play, it is one of our innate tendencies, and if we aren’t aware of the game we are playing, we will play it until the anticlimactic or tragic end. We can’t choose whether or not to play, but we can which game to play by what rules we decide to keep. Life is the same set of game pieces for everyone, and we can play how we want, but we should figure out what game the pieces are made to play, figure out what the rules for the game are.

I think the game is this: we live in two worlds, the world of logic and the world or meaning, and we trying to get the pieces of each to the other side. We are trying to bring logic to meaning and find meaning in logic, which optimizes both.

The world of logic and the world of meaning are wrestling, but we can help them dance. It is only once we tie ourselves to logic, and tie ourselves to meaning through responsibility that we can pull the strings and make them dance. We are the puppeteers of our own happiness, how we animate what we have control over in life is what we will see.

When our game is to practice with the responsibility we have so we are ready to tackle new responsibility when it comes, we will be happy in Olympic times of peace as well as times of war.

I decided some time ago to make a list of all the things I could take responsibility for, one of the best ones I found was to take responsibility for having reasonable expectations for the consequence of my actions; too often we do things that in hindsight we have no idea why we did them. I have heard several people say, “I just want them to know how much I hate them…” to which when I asked, “Why?” they just starred at me as if I was crazy. If we are not currently happy, it is likely that what we have filled in the blanks of “if ___ just ___, then I would be happy,” has not and is not working, and if we want to be happy we should expect to have to change something about it.

We have two opportunities to learn and grow, after an action when disappointment hits and we can reflect on what or who we were trying to change, and before an action when we can ask, “Is this meaningful, and is it true?”

Stop feeling like a pawn in the game. Figure out the rules and become a champion.