Happiness is...

The billion, trillion, ogighqgaeivhdignoi - illion dollar question is pretty clear: What is happiness and how can I get me some? What if you knew the answer? How much dough could you get from unhappy bazillionaires? A cool million? Well that's not all that stimulating nowadays is it? How about a billion? I bet you could get more. I bet you could get a number of dollars that we haven't made a number for yet. You could probably sell your secret to happiness for one ogighqgaeivhdignoi - illion dollars! In "The Grapes of Wrath," John Steinbeck wrote,

“If he needs a million acres to make him feel rich, seems to me he needs it 'cause he feels awful poor inside hisself, and if he's poor in hisself, there ain't no million acres gonna make him feel rich..."

A good place to start my literary inspection of what famous authors think of happiness. I like old Steinbeck. He was one of the few authors I READ instead of renting the movies of his books or getting the Cole's Notes. Of course I DID rent the movies too, they're pretty good, but I really DID read Steinbeck! Honest Injun! lol (see Valentine's post)

Steinbeck is one of many who will tell you that money can't bring you happiness. So I guess my idea of selling the secret to happiness would be a self-defeating process. Ironic at best. I guess I'll have to give it away for free then. But if I were to come up to you and say, "Friend, I have the secret to happiness and I'm going to give it to you absolutely free of charge," you'd think I was selling something wouldn't you? I would just have to be more careful in the selection of my words I suppose. But even if I could somehow convince you that I wasn't trying to sell you a product or attract you to my club or religion, I would have to convince you somehow that I was smart, or at least sane. And that could prove difficult to do...

"Sanity and happiness are an impossible combination." Mark Twain

"Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know." Ernest Hemingway

Stephen King, (and I LOVE the fact that he's now included on lists like this with literary greats!), says, "Happiness should remain unexamined for as long as possible." I guess the examination of it, the thoughtful, intellectual evaluation of it, is what he is implying will destroy it.

Douglas Adams in "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" wrote, "I'd far rather be happy than right any day." Again the old "ignorance is bliss" argument. And don't you kind of envy the blissfully ignorant who have no need of fact or reason or logic to mount an aggressive offensive against you? "Never let the truth stand in the way of a good story." Or a good argument, to take my own liberty with the quote. There is some debate as to whether Mark Twain said this or not so to avoid dispute I'll just credit it to, oh, Samuel Clemens.

"If you tell a big enough lie, and tell it frequently enough, it will be believed." Adolf Hitler

What? Hitler was an author! And it's a quote that segues nicely into my next one:

"The choice for mankind lies between freedom and happiness and for the great bulk of mankind, happiness is better." George Orwell

Well? Isn't freedom about the biggest lie EVER? It's up there for sure. But anyway, back to our purpose, is the true source of happiness to be ignorant enough to not know that there are terrible people compromising your rights and freedoms and, indeed, your happinesses? THAT sounds contradictory too, doesn't it? If you remain ignorant to increase happiness, but that happiness is decreased, thus ends the ignorance. Ignorance can only lead to happiness if that happiness remains undiminished, no?

This leads us in two directions: 1. You can choose to break out of the ignorance and espouse the Thomas Hardy, Buddhist philosophy illustrated in the quote, "Happiness is a mere episode in the general drama of pain." Or 2. you can always fake it.

"Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison to the overcompensation for misery. And, of course, stability isn't nearly so spectacular as instability." Aldous Huxley

Let's start with the second one. The "overcompensation for misery." I love that! How often we see it, as if the world actually HAS developed Huxlian Soma! (Soma was a "happiness" pill in "Brave New World") Wash that misery right outta your brain! Act as if. This really bugs me. Now I know it's nice to have upbeat, positive people in the room. Oscar Wilde said, "Some cause happiness wherever they go. Others WHENever they go." And really, what post with great literary quotes would be complete without one from Wilde?

Anyway, I like positive people as much as the next guy, but I don't like forced positivity. I think it's unnatural. Me and Fyodor Dostoevsky. "Man only likes to count his troubles; he doesn't calculate his happiness." So I suppose it's a strategy to employ a kind of self-delusion and force your brain to somehow think happiness into existence.

"I must learn to be content with being happier than I deserve." Jane Austen

"Happiness is a gift and the trick is not to expect it, but to delight in it when it comes." Charles Dickens.

A HA! Maybe this is the source of unhappiness! Our incessant expectation of happiness. Heck, the United States guarantees its citizens the right to the pursuit of happiness! Who are we to think we deserve happiness? Isn't that kind of arrogant? Is this just another example of the increasingly entitled mentality of the priveleged? How often do we bitch about a hard day even though most of the world has it worse than us? I'm guilty.

Just yesterday I woke up late. I had a day off work. I got on my computer and the wifi was excruciatingly slow! It passed in and out and interrupted my conversation with my friend, Paula, on Facebook as well as some games of Trivia Crack I was having. I was really annoyed! Then I went to the kitchen to make some brunch. The kitchen sink tap wouldn't shut off and when it's left on it squeals loud enough to hear in my room. It's been like that for months and nobody will fix it. Also annoying. The community fridge door was left open and my milk for my tea wasn't cold. All happiness-killers.

Then the POWER went out. So I took a shower, in the dark, and went into town to get some groceries. When I got out of the supermarket the sky was clear all around but it was raining a bit. I decided to walk home for the exercise. The sky was cloudless upwind yet miraculously the rain got heavier and heavier! A weather anomaly not unheard of in rainy season in Indonesia. I was soaked and so were my groceries by the time I got home. And, of course, the instant I got in the door the rain stopped.

The power was back on so I decided to turn on the air conditioner to cool off. Even though I was soaked with rain it was a warm rain. The batteries in my remote control for the air conditioner were dead. I had some batteries. Wrong size. Nobody in the place had the right size. I stood on a shaky chair in my room and with a spatula tried to hit the manual power button on the air con. It turned out to be just a light. There IS no manual way to turn the thing on. I went the entire night with only a couple hours of sweaty sleep.

I was bemoaning my plight when I came across, on my functioning internet, a list of famous authors' quotes on happiness. And it put it all into perspective. It might have been Kurt Vonnegut's quote, "I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, 'If this isn't nice, I don't know what is." I have said for a while now that if I ever get a tattoo I'll get one that says, "Appreciate what you have." And I'll get it somewhere that I can see it a lot every day. So then I re-evaluated my day.

I had a day off for crying out loud! Free to do whatever I wanted, within reason. I had internet, such as it was, I had power to run my computer, I had a computer, and I had a place to live in which to put that computer. A desk, a chair, a coffee... I had a friend! Long time friend from high school, Paula, thousand of miles away and we were just shootin' the breeze. I had a fun game to play. We played Trivia Crack while we chatted. I had my health, my youth, I wasn't hungry or thirsty, I wasn't fighting a war, I actually had it pretty dog-gone good! Better than most people on the Earth. I made some nice spaghetti with meat sauce and some garlic toast, watched a couple movies I had somehow managed to get on my computer, and I had a really good day. And I was whining and complaining to Paula.

I think this is the purpose of my existence here. I have to cultivate this strategy for happiness. I'm not like Jack Kerouac who wrote, "Happiness consists in realising it is all a great strange dream." I don't think so. I could be wrong, or I could be thinking more clearly than a guy who liked to keep his mind in a semi-dream state of chemical alteration a lot and frequently wrote IN such a state. I think life is shit. Basically. If you look at all the brutal things happening with governments, corporations, banks and militaries all over the world, you could get pretty depressed. We're almost in a state of Orwellian dystopia now, some would say we ARE in one. It's pretty crappy and I have come to the conclusion that it ain't getting any better. But I believe it has a purpose in its unhappiness and, as Edith Wharton wrote, "If you make up your mind not to be happy, there's no reason why you shouldn't have a fairly good time."

As the Taoists say, "Find joy in the suffering." And there, my friends, is the key. Find your joy. I find joy in travel, eating, drinking, friends, new cultures, fishing, sports, writing, games, watching family and friends grow up, having good conversations, and hundreds of much simpler things. One author I was morally outraged NOT to find on the list I'm taking most of these quotes from is Tom Robbins. He wrote a story, I think you can find it in "Wild Ducks Flying Backward," about what he would order for his last meal on death row. It was a magnum opus about a tomato sandwich. That's it. A tomato sandwich that was so succulently described that after reading it I made myself a tomato sandwich.

I don't think we need to have grandiose strategies regarding our pursuit of happiness, I just think we need to train our overstimulated brains to slow down and appreciate the really great stuff we have. "If this isn't nice, I don't know what is." You don't need to be winning an Olympic gold medal or planting a flag atop Mr. Everest to utter these words. You could be eating a really great tomato sandwich.

I'm not saying I've nailed this strategy. I think I'll still be working on it till the day I die. It's TOUGH! But I need to keep reminding myself and striving to do it. For instance, I now want a tomato sandwich but I'm out of tomatoes. Instead of cursing the high prices of tomatoes at Ranch Market and the other tenants here for clogging the fridge with their food that just stays there month after month, goes bad and takes up space I could have used for tomatoes, I have to tell myself, "Hey, I still have some spaghetti sauce from yesterday. It has tomatoes in it." Call this overcompensation for misery if you like, but I'm going to eat some spaghetti with some nice garlic bread and a glass of milk. I'm pretty sure that is going to make me happy.