Nobody has a right to happiness. I heard a woman declare this on the radio while I was walking through the kitchen. I kept going but what she said circulated in my mind as an idea that could save us a great deal of trouble if we could take it on board.
Of course, almost everybody is happy now and again but it comes and goes, and seeing happiness as a right causes much anxiety and disappointment in our lives.
I once worked with a man who, in judging the quality of his underlings’ work, would frequently declare, slowly and deliberately, “I am not happy.” He had a very sonorous voice. To make matters worse, he had a habit of spacing out his words when making pronouncements. The longer the space between words, the more unhappy he was with our efforts.
When he was very, very unhappy, each word fell like a pebble into a bucket of water and rippled out agonisingly before the next one plopped in.
Today I can laugh at the presumption behind his words which was that he had a right to be happy and those who worked under him had a duty to make him happy.
Secret of happiness
I know now that if any of us had figured out a way to make this man happy we should have, as Ruby Wax put it in another context in her book
Frazzled
, rung up the Dalai Lama’s people and told them we’d cracked the secret of happiness.
More recently, passing through the kitchen again, I heard the philosopher, Alain de Botton, assert that people in relationships cannot be expected to make each other happy all the time.
That might seem pretty obvious but how often do you and I act as though it is actually the duty of somebody else to make us happy?
Even scaling this down from relationships to a day in the life, how often do you feel disappointed that a day did not make you happy? Perhaps you are even concerned that you will not be happy this afternoon or this evening?
If you accept that happiness comes and goes – often, so far as I can see, of its own accord – then you can quit fretting so much. You can appreciate it when it’s there and accept when it’s not that it will return again for another visit.
The same goes for your life. If you’re like me, you are far from happy with aspects of how your life has gone. What that means is that you are normal.
This doesn’t mean that you ought to stay in situations that consistently make you unhappy. After all, nobody is saying you have a duty to be unhappy either.
It’s more a matter of treading lightly regarding this whole matter of happiness and unhappiness.
When you’re happy, you can avoid clinging on to the need to stay happy and, when you’re unhappy, you can avoid regarding it as a very terrible thing. That’s easier said than done, of course.
We probably focus on unhappiness as part of a defence system that doesn’t want us to get complacent and eaten by a tiger.
So you have to make an effort to appreciate happiness but the effort is worthwhile so long as you don’t tie yourself in knots over it.
In other words, be careful about pursuing happiness too hard. US citizens have a constitutional right to the pursuit of happiness but that hasn’t stopped lots of them from feeling the need to own a gun or guns with which many people get killed every day. If the dogged pursuit of happiness worked, I’m guessing they wouldn’t need all those guns.
You’ve probably heard the analogy that happiness is like a butterfly that lands on your hand and as soon you notice it, the butterfly flutters away. I think that’s a pretty good attitude to happiness.
The “I am not happy” man I mentioned earlier could have saved himself and me a lot of trouble by adopting that image as his guide.
Padraig O'Morain is accredited by the Irish Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy. His latest book is Mindfulness for Worriers. His daily mindfulness reminder is free by email.
pomorain@yahoo.com Twitter: @PadraigOMorain