Happiness is a spirit that visits us, but how do we speak of it

"So Much Happiness" by Naomi Shihab Nye

"It is difficult to know what to do with so much happiness.
With sadness there is something to rub against,
a wound to tend with lotion and cloth.
When the world falls in around you, you have pieces to pick up,
something to hold in your hands, like ticket stubs or change.

"But happiness floats.
It doesn't need you to hold it down.
It doesn't need anything.
Happiness lands on the roof of the next house, singing,
and disappears when it wants to.
You are happy either way.
Even the fact that you once lived in a peaceful tree house
and now live over a quarry of noise and dust
cannot make you unhappy.
Everything has a life of its own,
it too could wake up filled with possibilities
of coffee cake and ripe peaches,
and love even the floor which needs to be swept,
the soiled linens and scratched records. . . .

"Since there is no place large enough
to contain so much happiness,
you shrug, you raise your hands, and it flows out of you
into everything you touch. You are not responsible.
You take no credit, as the night sky takes no credit
for the moon, but continues to hold it, and share it,
and in that way, be known.

I was recently asked by a member of the Urmston congregation I serve Mary to explore happiness during our recent “Common Search for Meaning” group. I will be honest with you, I wasn’t quite sure where to begin. How do you talk about happiness? What on earth is this thing we called happiness?

As Naomi Shihab Nye writes 'With sadness there is something to rub against,' It is easy to speak of sadness, it feels embodied, there is a deep weight a heaviness to it. It has a power that feel like it is pushing you down. Sometimes just raising your head can feel impossible when weighed down by sadness. The sadness can feel so locked in that that no happiness can break through.

Happiness is more of a “willow the whisp”, like a little sprite. It seems to come and go almost unbidden, out of your control. All you can do with it, according the Nye at least, is to simply “shrug, . . . raise your hands . . . take no credit. . . .”

Happiness seems to lack a body, a weight, it is hard to put your finger on, it is not a static state of being. It seems impossible to name and or even talk about. It seems to go against the very grain of our modern materialistic age. How do we talk about happiness?

I am reminded here of something I once read by Henri Nouwen on why it so much easier to speak of our troubles than of joy and happiness. It seems it is not only a British thing. He wrote of his university days:

"I vividly remember how one of my university teachers spoke for a whole year about anxiety in human life. He discussed in great detail the thoughts of Kierkegaard, Sartre, Heidegger, and Camus and gave an impressive exposé of the anatomy of fear. One day, during the last month of the course, a few students found the courage to interrupt him and ask him to speak a little about joy before the course was over. At first he was taken aback. But then he promised to give it a try. The next class he started hesitantly to speak about joy. His words sounded less convincing and penetrating than when he spoke about anxiety and fear. Finally, after two more meetings, he told us that he had run out of ideas about joy and would continue his interrupted train of thought. This event made a deep impression on me, especially since I had such great admiration for my teacher. I kept asking myself why he was unable to teach about joy as eloquently as he had taught about anxiety.

It is the same with happiness. We have no trouble describing our sadness, what is wrong, what sickens us as individuals and as a society. Nouwen observed there are far “more words for sickness than for health, more for abnormal conditions than for normal conditions. When my leg hurts, my head aches, my eyes burn, or my heart stings, I talk about it, often in elaborate ways, but when I am perfectly healthy I have little, if anything, to say about those parts of my body.”

Think about the word resentment. It comes from resentere which literally means to re-feel something. Now when we re-feel something a memory from our past life it doesn’t have to be a painful memory, something that makes us angry and yet the word resentment only has negative connotation. We do not have a word that means to re-feel something that made us happy. There is no specific word for this in the English language.

Now please do not get me wrong. I am not for one moment suggesting that we ought not to talk about our troubles. My word we all have them. Whether that is our personal ones, our health, physical, emotional, mental and or spiritual. Our families, our communities, our wider world. We all live with fears and anxieties and pain brought to our being due to these sufferings. I have plenty myself. In fact sharing our troubles often helps and connects us with one another and through this we may find a freedom that allows happiness to visit once may. We do need to be careful not to become weighed down and enslaved by our struggles though, to the point that this is all that we are.

I was out an about on Monday morning, walking through Altrincham with Molly towards Stamford park. This is how I begin my week probably 9 times out of 10. I left the house with a variety of troubles on my mind. Concerns about the communities I serve. Family issues, folk close to me. Worries about the wider world, both within this country and conflicts in other places. I watched folk as I passed through town and connected. I was also thinking about this subject, how to talk about happiness. I said hello to a few folk and we exchange pleasantries. As I was walking Angela Fowler came into my mind. What a wonderful person she was an example of someone who lived with many struggles in life and yet lived with a sense of joy and happiness in life too. How she was one of those people who was genuinely pleased for others. She had such a wonderful quality about her.

I enjoyed the park, as did Molly. I enjoyed watching those exercising and young parents with babies and pre-school children. I spoke with a few folk and enjoyed the dogs playing together in their delightful way, they were naturally happy. There is something about watching labradors and spaniel’s in particular frolicking in the park. As I got lost in the moment of their play I was visited by that spirit I call happiness.

I walked home smiling with one or two ideas forming. I passed a woman I talk to from time to time. She has a tiny Cavalier King Charles Spaniel. It has had health troubles. It is doing well she tells me and it was a delight to see the happiness on her face as she spoke of her dear sweet dog. As I walked away, I felt that spirit of happiness taking over me. As I reached the crossing, a little later, I heard my name called out. Rosemary Donaldson approached me. She began telling me about what she was doing and then began to speak to me about Angela Fowler, how much she missed her how she had been such an inspiration to her. I told her I had been thinking of her too and we stopped and spoke of Angela for quite some time. As we did, I could feel that spirit of happiness working through us. I walked home with the biggest beaming smile and then got down to some work.

As I did, I thought of seeing and witnessing happiness in folk over the last few days. Observing people lost and absorbed in what they were doing. How in so doing it seems that this spirit of happiness had taken them over. I thought of the Mayor’s Civic Reception I had been invited to last Friday. It was a moving evening, especially listening to people share their stories of struggles and living with M.E. At the same time, I enjoyed experiencing a variety of talented people sharing their artistic gifts. I observed them lost in their work, being visited by that spirit of happiness and sharing it with others. It was strange evening in someways. There were tables full of people in their finery and others sharing gifts and sharing stories. I was happy to be a part of it, although I did experience a little bit of imposter syndrome. I thought to myself, how did I end up here. It made me smile. I felt a sense of happiness.

Here’s another wonderful poem

“HAPPINESS” by Jane Kenyon

There’s just no accounting for happiness,
or the way it turns up like a prodigal
who comes back to the dust at your feet
having squandered a fortune far away.

And how can you not forgive?
You make a feast in honor of what
was lost, and take from its place the finest
garment, which you saved for an occasion
you could not imagine, and you weep night and day
to know that you were not abandoned,
that happiness saved its most extreme form
for you alone.

No, happiness is the uncle you never
knew about, who flies a single-engine plane
onto the grassy landing strip, hitchhikes
into town, and inquires at every door
until he finds you asleep midafternoon
as you so often are during the unmerciful
hours of your despair.

It comes to the monk in his cell.
It comes to the woman sweeping the street
with a birch broom, to the child
whose mother has passed out from drink.
It comes to the lover, to the dog chewing
a sock, to the pusher, to the basketmaker,
and to the clerk stacking cans of carrots
in the night.
It even comes to the boulder
in the perpetual shade of pine barrens,
to rain falling on the open sea,
to the wineglass, weary of holding wine.

I am not sure that happiness is something that we can pursue and catch. The foundation of the American Republic is “Life Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness”. I am not sure that this is the right objective in life. It seems very self-centred and if not achieved fully sets folk up for dissatisfaction and envy. I suspect that if what your aim in life is to feel happy you will rarely achieve it; if one day you do, then your focus will be on holding onto it. I am not convinced that this is possible. Yes, live the good life, the worthy and meaningful life as they great philosophies teach, but happiness ought not to be the aim in itself, only the product of living this way. When I think of Angela, she seems to be an example of this. Yes she had her struggles, but she knew happiness.

I suspect that the key maybe to find ways to savour the experiences of being alive and to share these moments with others. This is certainly when I experience being visited by the spirit of happiness. It is when I feel free and most alive. It certainly has been the last week or so, despite my real worries and concerns.

I live in the real world and the real world concerns me greatly I carry the same worries we all do. I awake each day with same dilemma that E.B. White wrote of “It’s hard to know when to respond to the seductiveness of the world and when to respond to its challenge. If the world were merely seductive, that would be easy. If it were merely challenging, that would be no problem. But I arise in the morning torn between the desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.”

Now I cannot save the world. That does not mean I avoid it. No instead I do what I can, put my whole self into it and in so doing I am visited. by the spirit of happiness. Not constantly, but when I let myself go and give myself fully to it. The spirit visits me and this spirit sets me free.

This makes me happy and this is my best way I know how to speak of it.

I am going to end with a bit of wisdom from Mary Oliver. A moment of happiness that changed her life. Here she describes being visited by that “sprite” of happiness. She puts the experience in such a beautiful way. She savoured this life, despite the very real struggles she faced and she found a way to share what she experienced. As a result, she knew happiness and others experienced it too.

"Once, years ago, I emerged from the woods in the early morning at the end of a walk and — it was the most casual of moments — as I stepped from under the trees into the mild, pouring-down sunlight I experienced a sudden impact, a seizure of happiness. It was not the drowning sort of happiness, rather the floating sort. I made no struggle toward it; it was given. Time seemed to vanish. Urgency vanished. Any important difference between myself and all other things vanished. I knew that I belonged to the world, and felt comfortably my own containment in the totality. I did not feel that I understood any mystery, not at all; rather that I could be happy and feel blessed within the perplexity — the summer morning, its gentleness, the sense of the great work being done though the grass where I stood scarcely trembled. As I say, it was the most casual of moments, not mystical as the word is usually meant, for there was no vision, or anything extraordinary at all, but only a sudden awareness of the citizenry of all things within one world: leaves, dust, thrushes and finches, men and women. And yet it was a moment I have never forgotten, and upon which I have based many decisions in the years since."

From "Long Life: Essays and Other Writings" by Mary Oliver

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