Finding Happiness and My Little Hobbit Dad
Living Happy
When I was younger, I’d try to avoid talking to my little hobbit dad on the phone. I know! I was horrible. But he tended to talk for hours and I never seemed to have hours.
My reluctance was really because he would ask the most innocent questions that would dramatically shift me out of my comfort zone.
Because he’d ask, I’d list all these things that I was doing. I was running for office, starting graduate school. I was about to get married. I was financially stable (ish). I was checking off all the boxes. No longer living in an apartment with the roof collapsing. No longer living in a car when the apartment got too cold.
And then he asked, Staten-Island voice breaking through the phone, “Yes, Carriekins, but are you happy?”
I didn’t know.
“What even is happy, Dad?” I asked.
“You know it when you’re in it, I think,” he said. “For me, it’s watching birds. Or knowing you kids are okay. Or helping someone.”
My dad was always helping someone. Need to go to a doctor’s appointment? He was there bringing you. Something broken in your car? He was there fixing it. Needed your walk shoveled? He was there with a shovel. Sad because you did something wrong? He was there with a box of tissues and an offer of chocolate cake.
I never thought that he was there because it helped increase his own happiness. I always thought that he was there because it was his nature.
“I choose to do those things,” he said. “I choose because it’s the right thing to do and my heart can take it when I choose the wrong thing to do.”
My dad was influencing his own happiness.
Happiness is what exactly?
The belief that we can influence our own happiness and that we deserve to be happy is actually a pretty modern belief.
Darrin M. McMahon writes in Greater Good,
“People prior to the late 17th century thought happiness was a matter of luck or virtue or divine favor. Today we think of happiness as a right and a skill that can be developed. This has been liberating, in some respects, because it asks us to strive to improve our lots in life, individually and collectively.
“But there have been downsides as well. It seems that when we want to be happy all of the time, we can forget that the pursuit of happiness can entail struggle, sacrifice, even pain.”
Positive psychology researcher Sonja Lyubomirsky writes about happiness in her book The How of Happiness (2007) and says that happiness is “the experience of joy, contentment, or positive well-being, combined with a sense that one’s life is good, meaningful, and worthwhile.”
Others like Ed Diener assess happiness via the lens of life satisfaction. That basically means you think life is pretty okay and worth living it.
Dr. Lyubomirsky discusses positive affect, measuring it on a scale (Positive and Negative Affect Scale). The difference between positive affect and happiness is that happiness tends to be thought of as a bit more enduring than positive affect.
And then there is subjective wellbeing. It’s a lot like happiness, but more about self life evaluation.
McMahon writes,
“Language reveals ancient definitions of happiness. It is a striking fact that in every Indo-European language, without exception, going all the way back to ancient Greek, the word for happiness is a cognate with the word for luck. Hap is the Old Norse and Old English root of happiness, and it just means luck or chance, as did the Old French heur, giving us bonheur, good fortune or happiness. German gives us the word Gluck, which to this day means both happiness and chance.
“What does this linguistic pattern suggest? For a good many ancient peoples—and for many others long after that—happiness was not something you could control. It was in the hands of the gods, dictated by Fate or Fortune, controlled by the stars, not something that you or I could really count upon or make for ourselves. Happiness, literally, was what happened to us, and that was ultimately out of our hands.”
McMahon mentions Cicero’s statement that a happy person is always a happy person even when they are being tortured.
“That sounds ludicrous to us today—and perhaps it is—but it very nicely captures the way the ancients thought of happiness, not as an emotional state but as an outcome of moral comportment. ‘Happiness is a life lived according to virtue,’ Aristotle famously says. It is measured in lifetimes, not moments. And it has far more to do with how we order ourselves and our lives as a whole than anything that might happen individually to any one of us,” McMahon writes.
“I can’t stand the happiness of the light”
There is a video I just shared with one of my friends after seeing it on another friend’s Facebook page actually.
And it made me think of my dad who actually fought pretty hard for his happiness. He was prone to depression after my mom divorced him and went to a lot of therapy when I was young. I have distinct memories of him sitting on a bed at my Uncle Kilton and Aunt Jody’s house and crying. I held his hand. I was maybe five. The room, upstairs in an old New Hampshire farmhouse had all the shades pulled and I asked him why.
He said, “I’m just so sad that I can’t stand the happiness of the light.”
My little hobbit dad battled through that somehow and became one of the happiest people I know. He spread his love of life and of birds and trees and people’s stories. Constantly.
This man and this video reminds me of him and of the choices that we make every moment of our lives.
I hope you find some happiness today too, and that you can find the strength and have the ability to make choices that help.
LINKS TO LEARN MORE
https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/happiness_the_hard_way
https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007/978-1-4419-1005-9_978