Giving Up On Happiness
Today I am giving up, giving in, not doing it any longer. Running that is. Running in pursuit of happiness. No more pursuit. No more chasing. I’m going to lie down right here in this field of wildflowers and let myself be. Happiness, if it wants me, knows where to find me. I’ll be finding shapes in the clouds and looking for ladybugs.
I think the Greeks would agree with me. Their idea of happiness was that it just happens to you — you are granted favor by the gods, and often for willy-nilly reasons that no one can even explain. Even Aristotle took time out from teaching his Golden Mean to admit, “Hey, I’m not sure if these things actually make a person happy, but perhaps they’ll help.” The ancients must have been on to something.
Even now, happiness is one of those words that doesn’t really have a verb. It’s not actually something we can do, even though it does sound nice when we say things like this to ourselves. We can be happy. We can see and experience happiness. But do happiness? It’s all in the word itself. Happiness … from hap … which simply means “chance.”
This was true for the Latin word for happy: Felix (from which we get today’s word, felicitous) simply meant lucky.
And this was also true for the Greek word, eudaimion, which in its literal translation meant something like “good spirit,” something like what we might call today a guardian angel or a spirit guide. To be eudaimion in ancient Greece, therefore, was to basically have the favor of your guardian spirit.
How to get or ensure this favor? That’s what the old, sage philosophers –like Aristotle, Socrates, and Plato – were going on about: Which actions produce it? What do I need to do to make my guardian angel favor me?
And over that subject there was a lot of debate, and still is, even to this day. And it’s probably from them that we get the whole idea that happiness can be found or earned somehow, rather than basically be something that just seems to … happen.
So what are we knocking ourselves out about? I sure as heck don’t know.
But I’m going to take my cue today from the ancients … and from actress Lindsay Duncan.
Lindsay is the lovely Katherine, an eccentric ex-pat living in Italy, in Audrey Wells’ film, Under the Tuscan Sun. In one of my favorite scenes, she becomes exasperated with her friend Frances (Diane Lane) for all of Frances’ constant boohooing over whether she is happy or unhappy, and finally says to her:
I used to spend hours looking for ladybugs. Finally, I’d just give up and fall asleep in the grass. When I woke up, they were crawling all over me.
What she says is not all that much different from what Nathaniel Hawthorne, two hundred years ago, said either:
Happiness is like a butterfly which, when pursued, is always beyond our grasp, but, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you.
So, if you’ll excuse me now, I’m tired of all this running. I’ve got a field I want to go lie down in, with a patch of daisies calling my name.
Care to join me?
Ladybug wishes,
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Photo Credit Jeff Kubina
