Happiness

I just read an essay from the August 23 issue of The Dallas Morning News (Points section) that my mother-in-law had left lying around our living room. In it, Tim Kreider, a cartoonist, writes about how happiness seems to be best apprehended in retrospect. Here is a quote: “… during the time I was actually focused on drawing, I wasn’t conscious of feeling ‘happy,’ or of feeling anything at all. I was in the closest approximation to happiness that we can consistently achieve by any kind of deliberate effort: the condition of absorption. My senses were so integrated that, on those occasions when I had to re-draw something entirely, I often found that I would spontaneously recall the same measure of music or line of dialog I’d been listening to when I’d drawn it the first time; the memory had become inextricably encoded in the line. It is this state that rock-climbers and pinball players and libertines are all seeking: an absorption in the immediate so intense and complete that the idiot chatter of your brains shuts up for once and you temporarily lose yourself, to your relief. I suspect there is something inherently misguided and self-defeating and hopeless about any deliberate campaign to achieve happiness. Perhaps the reason we so often experience happiness only in hindsight, and that chasing it is such a fool’s errand, is that happiness isn’t a goal in itself but is only an aftereffect.”

I have always believed that “the pursuit of happiness” enshrined in our Declaration of Independence is a false pursuit. Happiness is indeed a byproduct of living in the manner that God intended for you to live: doing what you’re called to do, being who you’re called to be, and, above all, directing your attention off of yourself and onto God and your neighbor. Mr. Kreider approaches the subject from a secular standpoint and gets most of the way there, but I would refine his thoughts by adding that, when you live for God and His Kingdom, you will truly be happy. However, living a life of praise and gratitude brings our past happiness to the present and enables us to enjoy the riches of God’s goodness now. When I have a thankful heart, I am truly happy, just as I am when I am absorbed in my work of administration (or lost in creating a prayer letter, or whatever).

By the way, I love the line about “idiot chatter.” Mr. Kreider nailed that right on the head. Idle hands lead to foolish thinking, at least for me.