10
“What we need for our happiness is often close at hand, if we knew but how to seek for it.”
– Nathaniel Hawthorne
Issue 10
May 21, 2015
Happiness is everyone’s aim, but start defining it and you float away in vague and hazy notions and assumptions that offer nothing useful at all. There must be something to the thought, however, because though ill defined, we have the word, and it must mean something. There are moods that we often confuse with happiness: joy, pleasure, elation, etc. We should be grateful when these come our way, but they don’t quite qualify as happiness, and they fade away as soon as we think about them. We desire all kinds of things that we know will not satisfy for very long: money, various experiences, possessions, etc. We want them. We work for them. We are unhappy if we do not have them. But if we get them, we are not quite willing to say, “At last, happiness.”
We will say: “I’m happy here.” “I never thought I would be this happy.” “I’d be happy if only he wouldn’t complain so much.” All well and good, but those moments do not last, and even as we focus upon them, to prolong them if we may, they fade away. For some, there are deeper, more profound experiences for which we use the words, ‘rapture’, ‘euphoria’, ‘ecstasy’, and ‘bliss’. These take us into strange territory, and do seem to open up into something that we might call happiness. Still, the idea and the experience are elusive.
Happiness, then, is something that humankind reaches for but cannot grasp, desires but cannot define, covets but cannot possess. It is, for us, a temporary experience, but behind the word is the idea of finality, a thought that shows up in two of the ideas of happiness that we have in western thought. One is found in Aristotle who said that happiness comes when one uses reason to live a life of virtue and is thus able to contemplate the final good. Not an everyday thought nowadays, but it is worth some attention. The other idea is that happiness marks moments in this life and in the life after death when we have a vision of God. This also is not an everyday thought, but it also is worth attention.
Earthbound mortals that we are, we can but stand on our side of the gulf and wonder. But we do not stand in total darkness. We have “Happy are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness,” “Happy are the peacemakers,” “Happy are the merciful,” and the rest. These beacons from the mountaintop give light to our journey and substance to our dreams. We may not be able to say in this life that we have arrived, but we can say there is light to guide our steps.
