Happiness, Shmappiness

All this fuss about happiness. Treatises on the topic replicating like bunnies. A whole school of psychology springing into existence. The latest and greatest research published in blogs on a daily basis.

People consider me a positive, even exuberant person. Yet I can’t help but wonder: Is happiness what it’s really all about?

Extreme examples: F. Scott Fitzgerald wasn’t always happy as he drank himself to death writing the great American novel. Mozart wasn’t necessarily happy as he composed the music that still makes so many of our souls fly. Van Gogh sure didn’t seem happy as he painted works of art that make me feel as though I’m conversing with the angels.

Hyperbole and oversimplification aside, I’ve found that my most intense and powerful growth has come from moments of unhappiness. At my first job, when I was posted to an oil and gas plant in rural Canada and told to “make people redundant.” After my divorce five years ago, when I felt like an utter failure. Now, facing 40 without the family I’d imagined I’d have.

These challenges have led me deeper into my spiritual practices: yoga, meditation, reading poetry, and serving the planet. With greater compassion for my own flaws, I’ve simultaneously developed more tolerance for the foibles of others. Thanks to unhappiness, I’ve truly accepted that I’m not perfect and can’t be the best at everything, in spite of having had an extraordinarily blessed life.

So these days, I seek peace. I make an effort to love every single person, from the woman who cuts me off on the freeway, to the guy at the checkout counter, to my parents and friends. I shine my light on them. I practice gratitude daily: for my family, home, city, work, heck, even my car (I am in love with my Mini!). I find utter joy in a few minutes of blissed out dancing at a club. In gazing at the flowers that deck my garden walk. In entering the flow of writing or swimming.

Then something jars me—a neck ache, a difficult conversation, a rejection from a potential lover. And I breathe. I find my smile. I recite my mantra, “Love more, fear less.”

What I have, as a result, is greater connectedness to all beings and to the Earth, and confidence that I’m okay, no, that I’m more than enough. And that’s not happiness. It’s something subtler. I call it wellbeing.