By Dr Satish C Aikant
Let me make a frank confession. I am not an advocate of or evangelist for ‘Self-Help’ kind of books that have been flooding the market. There are technical or professional skills that can be usefully learnt from manuals and guides. But can one take a guided tour for something as elusive and intangible as happiness which is more a state of mind than a material acquisition? Most of the Self-Help books end up benefiting not the intended readers but their authors, from the sales proceeds. However, Ruskin Bond’s new book How to be Happy released recently on the author’s ninetieth birthday is in a different league.
The title of the book may lead us to the misleading assumption that happiness is not natural; it has to be acquired and cultivated and that one has to ‘learn to be happy.’ Ruskin on the other hand suggests that happiness is very much within our reach. It would be futile to consciously strive for it. As the author writes: ‘Happiness will come your way if you don’t run after it. Chase a butterfly and it will fly away. Stay still, and it may settle on your hand.’ So where do you look for it? ‘You won’t find it on a menu card or on a television set. It inhabits a small space in your mind, and you must look for it there.’
Oprah Winfrey in a recent interview recalls the time when she was a little girl growing up in Mississippi. Fond of candy bars she learned for herself even as a little kid, that the candy bar tasted much better if she had somebody to say, ‘Isn’t this good?’ That is, if she could share it with somebody. And so, she understood the philosophy of sharing what you have, learning that all things in life get better when you share it, and when you do something for someone else, the benefit comes back to you as well as to them. ‘That’s where she got her great joy.’ Oprah sums up happiness in five words; Do Something for Someone Else. These five magic words are much easier to act on than what the world tells us we need to do to be happy.
How does one define happiness? Everyone can have his or her idea of happiness. According to Seneca, the Roman philosopher of first century, the pursuit of happiness (understood as Aristotelian eudaimonia) is the pursuit of reason derived from a meaningful life. It attends upon a life of austerity and moral discipline and not staying well within one’s comfort zone. He remarked: ‘A wise man is content with his lot, whatever it may be, without wishing for what he has not.’ This is also the message of the Bhagavad Gita which teaches us equanimity in pleasure and pain; joy and sorrow. The Katha Upanishad makes a distinction between that which is good (Shreyas) and that which is pleasant (Preyas): ‘Both good and pleasant present themselves to a man. The man of intelligence, having considered them, prefers the good to the pleasant; but the fool chooses the pleasant out of greed hoping to attain and retain things.’ John Stuart Mill makes a hierarchical distinction between sensual and intellectual pleasures asserting that ‘it is better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a pig satisfied.’ He argues that some pleasures are intrinsically better than others. Mill does not agree with Jeremy Bentham who held the view that all pleasures should be counted the same in the ‘hedonic calculus.’ Slavoj Zizek, the Slovenian philosopher, when asked what he found most depressing, bluntly answered: ‘the happiness of stupid people.’
Being happy all the time is not a realistic possibility. We are living in a world where violence is endemic and disasters, both natural and man-made, are commonplace even though the market forces are always offering goodies to make us forget our misery and promise us the utopia of consumerist bliss. We are made to believe that happiness as an object is within our reach, if only we can afford the price tag. Capitalism loves the goal of happiness since it claims to offer a variety of products that will promise it. Hence happiness, we are assured, is the objective of life and it is something we may get by endless shopping, and by using sophisticated gadgetry. Ruskin’s advice to the young and the old is: ‘Look after your eyes. The eyes are our windows to the world- the great wide beautiful world that is there for all of us to marvel at: blue skies, wandering clouds, mountains, forests, rivers, the sea, the moon, the stars, the rising sun- all the wonders of creation. The eyes see it all.’ Don’t ruin your eyesight by constantly gazing at screens- TV screens, laptop screens, smart phone screens.’
One of the most popular and most abused phrases in English is ‘Happy Birthday.’ Children are made to believe that happiness on this day is nothing more than cutting a cake, singing the birthday song and receiving expensively packaged gifts. The market forces have succeeded in reducing our ideas of happiness into a set of rituals of consumerism. It is a weird turn from the traditional mode of celebrating a birthday with thanksgiving and prayers for the well-being of all rather than indulging in a fashionable ‘birthday bash.’ Instead of striving for happiness we try to enact rituals of happiness such as Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, etc. The beneficiaries invariably are the business people.
Money cannot really buy happiness. If people strive for a certain level of affluence thinking that it will make them happy, they find that on reaching it they become very quickly habituated, and then they start hankering for the next level of material well- being. However, material advantages do not naturally translate into social and emotional benefits. In fact, to the extent that most of one’s psychic energy becomes invested in material goals a person loses the ability to derive happiness from other sources. Friendship, art, literature, natural beauty, religion, and philosophy become less and less interesting.
Cicero the Roman politician of antiquity said: ‘If you have a garden and a library you have everything you need.’ Times have changed radically but the primordial desire for happiness in self- sufficiency has not really changed.
Happiness is not a permanent state of being. I cannot say, now that I have achieved this, I’ll be happy. We are not primed to feel continuous satisfaction. All we have are happy moments. The idea of happiness has gradually transformed from a mental state to an objectified, measurable quantity of life that can be attained. The determined pursuit of happiness also implies that unhappiness is considered a pathological condition which must be treated medically. So, unhappiness is systematically subjected to medical scrutiny. We are made to believe that to acquire normal happiness one requires therapy, counselling or expert guidance from a psychiatrist or professional counsellor or alternatively, from a New Age guru. We do not realise that happiness resides in being one with oneself and that is should be self-generated.
For John Keats, the English romantic poet, melancholy was the cognate state of happiness and had to be courted rather than shunned:
Ay, in the very temple of Delight
Veiled Melancholy has her sovereign shrine.
Perhaps we should give up the grand idea of happiness and opt for smaller moments of exuberance, at times epiphanic, that we may find strewn about in everyday life. Such small moments of happiness serve as oases within the dreariness of existence. The presence of the unpleasant does not necessarily mean the diminution of happiness. The unpleasant becomes part of a happy life that oscillates between the pleasant and the unpleasant, achievement and failure, hope and disillusionment. So, one of the secrets of being happy is to accept being unhappy.
The hallmark of happiness is cheerful optimism developing ‘that serene and blessed mood’ in which, as Wordsworth remarked, ‘the heavy and the weary weight of all this unintelligible world is lightened.’ Ruskin offers another prescription: ‘Laugh at yourself. Laugh at life. A little laughter makes the day so much brighter, friendlier. People who don’t laugh are seldom happy. Don’t laugh at others. Seek out your own inconsistencies and laugh at yourself.’
Let me end my musings on happiness with a line from George Harrison of The Beatles fame welcoming the coming of a new day: ‘Here comes the sun, and I say It’s alright.’
(The writer is former Professor and Head of the Department of English, HNB Garhwal University).
