The Happiness Myth_ An Expose - Jennifer Hecht [172]
If you want to be happy, do some experiments. Try a variety of ways of being with people. Go to the Irish pub where they sing drinking songs, and sing along. At weddings, get up and dance. Go to the Coney Island Mermaid Parade, preferably dressed up like a mermaid. (You might not want to bring your parents, as there are always some mermaids who are pretty much naked.) If you see a bunch of people standing around a guitar player in Washington Square Park, and everyone is singing “Hey Jude,” you go over and sing, too. Go to big festivals, too: sports arenas, parades, music in the park. Join in when everyone is singing along or doing a chant. Think about how you feel in such settings. Speak clearly to yourself about what you get from the experience, and what you don’t get; which gatherings feel cheap or empty and which feel full of value. Rethink your drugs. Find out if coffee makes you happy. If you are a person who drinks a lot of alcohol sometimes, think of the philosophers who claimed that drink is the workingman’s access to the spiritual. Drinking too much will kill you. You shouldn’t do it. But as a culture, must we pretend people drink only to anesthetize themselves or to have a stupid kind of fun? Drinking is also interesting.
Sort the hard news from the soft news, and think about the kinds of narratives that get told in the soft news. Think about the stories that interest you. Ask yourself which of the upsetting stories make you happy. Are you drawn to the vicarious experience of any particular kind of loss? Are the news stories that draw your interest depressing you and not acting like myth? If so, stop reading them. But you may discover that these bloody family dramas do in fact act like myth. Recognizing this doesn’t do any harm, just as showing up to a large-scale parade in part as an emotional detective does not do that experience any harm. Both are like drugs: if you want to examine your response to scotch, you are still going to get drunk if you drink enough. With the parade, you have to show up and relax and let yourself be part of it. You will not have to try hard. Think about how you share the news with friends and strangers.
The poets, not a giddy bunch, have left us evidence that life will bloom into happiness now and again, for no reason. Happiness, like sadness, sometimes arrives of its own accord. To be treated to these mysterious waves of happiness, all we have to do is be there when they happen, live to see them. True, coffee, tea, or wine may have been on hand, so it might be a good idea to get a stimulating beverage. But mostly all you have to do is hang on and wait. Just as you don’t have to do anything to help make spring come, the winged happiness that the poets speak of will come on its own. It is coming. Earth will swing on its ellipse whatever you do, and crocuses will come up. The poets say happiness comes like this, though we cannot see the works. It is coming. This is an extremely encouraging insight, and I hope I will be able to remember it.
This book has also addressed the matter of truth for its own sake—not to do with happiness, but with reality. Consider a whole century of men and women straining to conserve the body’s energy, minimizing sport and exertion in order not to overspend their reserves, and then the entire next century straining to exercise the body so that it will become more efficient. You have been told by physicists and yogis that reality is not what it seems, that your mind makes the world you live in, and you believe it; but you also don’t believe it. Half the point of this book was for me to try to cheer everyone up at once. The other half was to demonstrate ways that we look up at the blue sky and say “green.” What I have offered is, in its own way, a philosophy. I have tried to show