I received potentially one of the most thoughtful gifts I can recall for Christmas this year. My dad bought me a book The Geography of Bliss by Eric Weiner. Eric is/was a foreign correspondent for NPR (a recent obsession of mine), an avid traveler, and a seeker of happiness. Clearly we have something in common. I've started reading the book which is a combination of stream of conscientiousness and planned narration. He visits different places in a search for the location of happiness, as in a country where everyone is happy, a city, a place, an actual location for happiness. It is so far an interesting summary of the few countries I have read through. All the while the prose is guided toward happiness, not adventure, not culture, not history like many other summaries of places but toward an intangible feeling - it's a very unique perspective for describing a place.
In my travels, I have not been actively trying to pulse the populations for their levels of happiness; however, I feel as though I tend to pick up on a general vibe. Much like Eric, I've found some places seem innately happier than others for reasons that I never really spent the time to analyze.
In my readings - which have only been about 140 pages of the book I've spent significantly more time thinking about happiness and asking myself the question "am I happy?" This leads to a perhaps even more perplexing question of "What is happy?" Or "How would I know?" The simple answer is "Yes." The more complicated answer is "I'm striving towards happiness and making progress."
I've started to create a mental list of things that I consider required for someone to be happy, tying it to a place like Eric is trying to do... well I'll need more time to delve into that. For now, here is my list - ever growing, ever shrinking, ever changing... always true:
1) Someone to bear witness to life. This means someone to share your life with and someone to share their life with you. Not necessarily a significant other/lover/wife/husband/etc. but someone constant to witness life as it happens to each other. This I think must be part of why breaking up hurts so much. You are loosing someone who you enjoyed witnessing and enjoyed letting them witness you.
2) Meaningful work. One of the best ways to bring me down, make me sad or temporarily depressed me is to give me the sense that I am not important. Even if I am only an assistant to the assistant, my job has meaning. I think everyone needs to feel as though what they do is somehow indispensable, important, required. It somehow feeds a sense of purpose and that I truly believe correlates directly to being happy
3) Curiosity. Many people's livelihoods are built on assisting people to push through comfort zones and to take a small level of risk. This, I would argue, is a result of people being unhappy in the current comfort zone they live in and a desire to change something, an unexplainable need to do something different, see something different(ly), simply be around something new. Curiosity, for me, pushes me out of my comfort circle as often as I can allow it. The idea of doing the same thing every day, seeing the same people, driving the same route, without a future change to look forward to would drive me mad. Ask my mom, I'm always ready for the next adventure, my wings always seem ready to spread out wide and help me soar to something else - even if it is only temporary.
4) A sense of familiarity. Almost counter-intuitive following the strong desire I have to see/try/do new and different things, but a sense of familiarity is indispensable. When I arrived back from my trip this past summer there was a huge wash of comfort, of relief, of dare I say happiness when I alighted the plane at LAX airport. I was so happy to be back around things I knew and a culture which I understood, and food I recognized, and a language I didn't have to mime through. This sense of familiarity might blur the thin yet important line between happiness and contentment and I'm not convinced it belongs on this list. Yet as I think about what makes me happy, moments in my life that I was sublimely 'happy' I recall returning to the familiar as a common thread in those moments.
Clearly this is a not an all encompassing list (at 4 items) but it is a start.
To finish out this post I'm going to quote The Geography of Bliss in the first discussions of what happiness is:
"My favorite definition of happiness sprang from the mind of an unhappy man named Noah Webster. When he penned the first American dictionary, in 1825, he defined happiness as "the agreeable sensations which spring from the enjoyment of good." That says it all. It has "agreeable sensations," the notion that happiness is a feeling. The hedonists would get off on that. It has "enjoyment," which signifies that happiness is more than pure animal pleasure. And enjoyment of what? Of the "good," a word that, I think, Webster should have capitalized. The Good. We want to feel good but for the right reasons. Aristotle would have approved of that. "Happiness is a virtuous activity of the soul," he said. A virtuous life, in other words, is a happy life."
Perhaps now I can appreciate why so much mind power, energy, time, and study has gone into understanding happiness and how to achieve it... seems like there is much more involved than simply eating chocolate and laughing with friends, although I'm sure Eric would not discount those as important facets of being happy.
As always, I'm interested in everyone else's thoughts - please comment liberally!
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