by EMMANUEL R. FERNANDEZ
The best thing about happiness is that you can give it to yourself anytime. You don’t need somebody else to give it to you. You don’t even need to have anything in order to be happy. That’s because happiness is ultimately a choice. You can choose to be happy anytime, anywhere -- whatever your circumstances may be. You may be in the middle of the most miserable circumstances, but you can still choose to be happy. No one and nothing can stop you from choosing to be happy if you really want to.
In fact, we can go beyond saying that you don’t need someone else to make you happy. We can go so far as to say that it would be a big mistake to ask or expect anyone to make you happy. You may have a very beautiful, talented and intelligent wife who loves and cares for you as though you were the most important person in the world. But if you still choose to be unhappy in spite of all that, you will be unhappy.
In the same manner, no matter how much you shower your young children or your old parents with all the gifts that are within your power to give, if they still opt to be unhappy in the end, you can do nothing about that.
No one has the power (nor the obligation) to make you happy except yourself; just as you do not have the power (nor the obligation) to make anyone else happy, no matter how much you love him or her. That power (and that obligation) belongs to the person who wants to be happy. To think otherwise is to put oneself in a position that will inevitably lead to many disappointments.
It would likewise be a big mistake to think that finally having the things you want will make you happy. The possession of beautiful and expensive things is by no means the key (much less, the prerequisite) to happiness.
Not so long ago, I stumbled upon two pictures on the internet that powerfully showed me how true that statement is. One was a picture of five little children pretending to take a “selfie” of themselves using, not a mobile phone, but the sole of a rubber slipper. From the picture, one could tell that the kids were not rich. Three of them were barefooted. The humble house in the background had a fence made of rusty G.I. sheets. Obviously, their parents could not afford to buy any of them a mobile phone – not even a cheap, second-hand one. They had to make-believe that the rubber slipper was a mobile phone. But their young faces glowed with immense happiness – one that made you yourself happy just by looking at it.
The other picture was that of a little girl sitting inside a small pail filled with water. Again, from the picture, one could tell that she did not come from a rich family. The pail looked old and rather dirty. But on the little girl’s face shone a ray of joy that many of us would gladly exchange our precious possessions for, if it were only possible to make such a barter.
Those children were happy not because they possessed beautiful and expensive things but because they had chosen to be happy with whatever it was that they had. In contrast, many children of rich families are perpetually unhappy in spite of the fact that they have the latest models of the most expensive mobile phone brands, and they have huge swimming pools right in front of their living rooms!
Indeed, happiness does not come from getting what you like, but from liking what you get -- even if what you get is not exactly what you wanted originally. It’s the attitude you choose to adopt vis-à-vis your current circumstances that makes all the difference.
But, at this point, one can ask: can I choose to be happy even if I have just lost my job, or someone has just broken my heart into many little pieces, or someone I love has just died? Of course, people will probably think you have gone crazy if you choose to be happy in the middle of such circumstances. And if you choose to be happy after you have just lost a “loved one,” the police will probably suspect that you had something to do with his or her death. But, humour aside, the answer to the question is yes – you can still choose to be happy even in the middle of such unhappy circumstances.
At the height of Adolf Hitler’s madness, when he was sending people with the slightest Jewish blood to concentration camps and gas chambers, one of his prisoners was a man named Viktor Frankl, an Austrian psychiatrist who happened to have a Jewish ancestry. Frankl survived the experience and later wrote a book about how he was able to endure the horrors of being a prisoner in Nazi concentration camps by finding a personal meaning in the unspeakable sufferings that he and his fellow prisoners had to go through. He kept his sanity and his will to survive intact by choosing to find meaning in his sufferings. He then concluded that “everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” [1]
If we find ourselves frequently (or worse, perennially) unhappy, it is probably because we have unconsciously chosen to be unhappy in any set of circumstances. We have probably adopted an attitude of unhappiness towards life in general, without our knowing it. And there are many ways by which we could be unwittingly led to make such a choice.
For instance, our cultural upbringing probably discouraged us from being “too happy” lest we would end up being very unhappy. I recall that, in the town where I grew up, older people used to warn us, children, against laughing too much or smiling too frequently. They told us that unhappiness is the jealous rival of happiness. Once unhappiness sees us being “too happy,” it will make every effort to drive away our happiness and put itself in its place. It took me a while to disabuse myself of this cultural belief.
Our distorted religious views could also make us adopt an overall attitude of unhappiness. I used the adjective “distorted” for a reason: more often than not, it is our erroneous interpretation of the doctrines of our religion that encourages us to be unhappy, and not the doctrines themselves.
As Christians, for example, we are taught to be sorry for our sins and do penance for them. We are taught to make amends for the wrongs we have done. But, we are not taught to spend the rest of our lives torturing ourselves for the sins we have committed, or destroying our lives in order to “pay” for our sins. Rather, after having asked and received God’s forgiveness, we are taught to stand up, sin no more, and proclaim – by word and deed – the good news of God’s salvation. As sinners, we are not taught to follow in Judas’ footsteps but Peter’s. Judas could not bring himself to believe that God would forgive his sin, and he ended up taking his own life. Peter, on the contrary, deeply regretted his own sin but allowed God to forgive him and make him whole again. Yet, how many of us, to a certain extent, wrongly follow in Judas’ footsteps instead of Peter’s?
Incidentally, Christianity is ultimately a religion that brims with joy. As Pope Francis points out in his apostolic exhortation, “Envangelii Gaudium”: “The Joy of the Gospel fills the hearts and lives of all who encounter Jesus. Those who accept his offer of salvation are set free from sin, sorrow, inner emptiness and loneliness. With Christ joy is constantly born anew…. The Gospel, radiant with the glory of Christ’s cross, constantly invites us to rejoice.” [2]. Still, no amount of Gospel passages that invite us to rejoice will ever succeed in doing so unless we decide to believe and heed them.
Finally, it is possible that the view of life which we have adopted inclines us towards unhappiness rather than happiness. Whether we are aware of it or not, each of us possesses what the Germans call a “weltanschauung” – a certain view of life, a personal “philosophy” of life (if you will). If the personal “philosophy” we have adopted makes us see life as nothing but an endless parade of useless tasks, meaningless events, worthless persons and what not, it would very difficult for us to choose to be happy at the same time.
And yet, the Existentialist philosopher Albert Camus convincingly asserts that even if life is indeed “absurd” as we believe it is, even if life is indeed bereft of any inherent meaning as we believe it is, we can still choose to be happy. Like the Greek mythological figure, Sisyphus, who was condemned by the gods to spend his entire life pushing a huge rock up a hill, only to see the rock roll back down every time it neared the top, we can choose to adopt a very different attitude towards our “futile and meaningless existence.” In his famous essay, “The Myth of Sisyphus,” Albert Camus imagines Sisyphus choosing to find meaning in his apparently futile and meaningless task. He imagines Sisyphus going down the hill after the rock has rolled back down, and making up his mind that the there is meaning in what he is doing. “If the descent is thus sometimes performed in sorrow,” Camus then concludes, “it can also take place in joy…. The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.” [3]
At the end of the day, the wonderful thing is that we do not have to remain prisoners of the faulty elements of our cultural upbringing, our misinterpretations of the teachings of our religion, or the pessimistic personal philosophies we have unconsciously adopted. We can always break free from them; and the process of our liberation begins with our being aware of the existence of our attitudinal enslavements.
We can choose to be happy anytime, anywhere, and in spite of anything. Or we can choose not to. It’s really all up to us.
_______________
[1] Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning (Boston, Mass.: Beacon Press, 1992 ), p. 75.
[2] Pope Francis, Evangelii Gaudium (The Holy See: Vatican Press, 2013), pp. 3 & 6.
[3] Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus (London: Penguin Books, 1975), pp. 109 & 111.
