If You're Happy and You Know it

A few months ago, I came across this quote:

Happiness is a great side effect but it makes a lousy goal.

-Mike Rowe 

Followed by a jaunty quip about how it's a good thing to have it, but not to make it your main focus, because you'll fail.

Does it make a lousy goal?  And will you fail, though?  What if it doesn't?  And what if you didn't (respectively)?  I happen to think happiness is a wonderful goal.  To achieve happiness in our lives in spite of our challenges, and the unpleasantness we can all face, to me, is great success.  What better goal is there, then, if not to live a life in happiness inviting others to experience it with you, holding space for their sorrows, and lifting them when they're down?  What better goal than to be of service to one another?  I honestly don't think there is one, but I understand how this notion of happiness as the end goal can seem problematic. 

In every area of life, we run into trouble when we over-complicate things.  

Look at what we do to love!  We over-complicate our relationships to an absurd degree, and then conflate that with love, because we (most of us, I think) haven't figured out that something can be both simple, and awesome at the same time.  No, we must make it a HUGELY deep, and sophisticated concept to the point where it does seem fictional, and legendary, and perpetually out of reach for the masses, because something that feels as good as joy, and love can feel incredibly intimidating if you're not ready to receive it, become it, or pay it forward. 

By perpetuating the myth that happiness is this colossal concept of perfect contentment, we end up pushing it away, and creating a self-fulfilling prophecy where it remains comfortably out of grasp.

We've been conditioned to treat happiness like some fleeting, unattainable outcome.  First of all, happiness does not equal a problem-free existence.  Happiness does not mean a life free from sorrows.

Happy literally means: feeling or showing pleasure or contentment.  

Nowhere in that definition does it say, "All of your problems have magically disappeared!" or, "You must experience happiness 100% of the time, all day long, everyday, for the entire year, and every single year thereafter for the rest of your life in order to qualify as having lived a happy life."  If that's closer to the definition people are using to measure their happiness against, of course we are going to buckle under that pressure, and gloriously fail at reaching the end-goal of happiness.  I've already failed it today, myself, and some of you probably have too!  Do I believe we're not going to live happy lives because of it?  Nope, and it certainly doesn't mean any of us should stop making moves in order to exist in pleasure, contentment, and dare I say it ... actual joy.

When I was 5 years old, my mother always told me that happiness was the key to life. When I went to school, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wrote down 'happy'. They told me I didn't understand the assignment, and I told them they didn't understand life.  

-John Lennon 

xoxo