What is happiness

Happiness - the quest for it seems to motivate everyone I know, and everyone I read about, living or dead. And yet we are all devoted to this feeling which is so ill defined.

I am pulling the Webster's off the shelf. What does it say?

Happy, hap'I, adj. Lucky; possessing or enjoying pleasure or good; pleased: furnishing or expressing enjoyment: apt felicitous (e.g. a phrase) - adv. Happily, - n happiness, - adj. Happy go lucky, easy-going; irresponsible. (hap)

Not particularly clear is it? But what I find interesting is everyone knows happiness when they reach it. Even people with no experience of happiness know what it is. I remember my brother, when he was born, cried for more than a year - he just did little else. But there is a picture of him I love, when he was a year old, standing in his crib, smiling his face off with a beaming grin. He had not had much experience with happiness, to be sure. But he took to it naturally when he was able. Then there's that song of Suzanne Vega's about the boy with the small white wooden horse, based on a true story.

My daughter certainly knows what happiness is. She just got back from the casino (with her uncle), and won fifty bucks! But I digress.

I ask again - what is happiness? The dictionary does not tell us much. Maybe biology can help! Feelings of contentment, if I were to guess, probably have their root in the limbic system, one of the most primitive parts of the brain. What I alluded to earlier - that instinctive recognition we all have of what happiness is - is probably an important evolutionary trait. For any creature to strive to reach an ideal - to be well fed, healthy and safe (along with the collective), it must have an innate sense of what that ideal is.

But biology does not fully answer the puzzle that is happiness either. Biology can tell us what happens (a rush of endorphins), and it can even explain in a cold and logical fashion how happiness evolved as a useful trait. But happiness, as we all know well, is experiential. You cannot explain happiness outside of the context of either being happy, or remembering happiness, or imagining the ideal that brings us happiness. So theorizing on where it came from does not help to understand happiness.

Human beings are given the gift of recognition. Unlike a computer, that can tell only probabilities, when we latch onto something we believe we know, it is because in that flash of a moment we just know.

So what is it that makes us happy? I believe that is quite fluid. We can actually train ourselves to find happiness in specific ways. Nobody is instinctively made happy by gambling, for instance (is that too snide? ;-) Instead, we are inculturated into finding happiness in gambling - the casino is glamorous, it feels like you're James Bond, a risk taking high roller, and despite the long odds, you might win big, and be seen winning big by others. The happiness-bringing aspects of gambling have to be explained first, then imagined, and only at that point, lived.

I think one of the easiest ways for human beings to find happiness, with little explanation, is in spirituality. I remember reading a story about Jane Goodall's chimpanzee friends in Gombe. (I hope I get this story right, because it has been a long time since I read it.) One time, after a storm, the chimpanzees looked out at the terrible beauty of the clouds and the sun emerging from them - Goodall described the chimpanzees getting excited and one by one, drumming on a log. She'd never seen the behaviour before, and never saw it again.

In these, our nearest relative, we see the most primitive echo of our own spirituality - and it is rooted in what is the newest of the primitive limbic emotions - awe. I remember when I first saw pictures of a star forming nebula taken by the Hubble telescope. The beauty of this stunned me. I cannot really tell you why I was so taken with it - really all I was staring at were carefully angled line screens put down on glossy paper in cyan, magenta, yellow, and black ink by a printing press.

But is it not ironic that so many things, that make us realize how small and inconsequential we are, are the very things that make us happy in the purest way? Unlike the casino or dinner and a movie, none of us requires any training to be made happy by a delightful coincidence, the presence of family, or a beautiful sunset.

If we have so much difficulty seeing God through our suffering, why is the reverse also true? People know spiritual happiness when it hits them - we know it in the most primitive parts of us. And without understanding even what happiness means, people today who experience true joy cannot fully understand what it is they are experiencing. This often includes that growing category of people who say they are "spiritual" but not "religious." But how can we ignore a God who makes happiness so core a part of our being that the quest for it is printed on our very soul?

"Then he showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city; also on either side of the river, the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, yielding its fruits each month; and the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations. There shall no more be anything accursed, but the throne of God and the Lamb shall be in it and his servants shall worship him." (Rev. 22:1-3)