If we ever wanted one thing, it might be enduring happiness.\

We may all want it, but very few of us have succeeded in finding it.

This month, the Atlantic Magazine devoted its entire March Issue to Happiness, how to find it and how to get it.

It got me thinking about happiness and what it means. It’s important to me. I will never forget what it means to be achingly unhappy.

I have a happiness list, and every once in a while, I go over it to see how I am doing and see what I can do to improve.

The list is of things that make me happy that are inside of me or around me and that I can grasp:

Maria.

My blog. My photography.

My dogs. Zinnia, Fate, Bud.

One or two friends.

Doing good Every Day.

Being honest. Honor.

Living with honor.

Color and light.

The farm.

Calling Out Peckerheads And Toothless Ducks.

My Leica

The donkeys, Lulu and Fanny.

It is being authentic.

Permitting No One to Change Me Other Than Me.

Growing and learning.

The Mansion, the lost memories, the refugees, Bishop Maginn High School.

The list changes from time to time; it is organic and fluid. It grows and shrinks.

When I think of these things or do them, I feel happy and satisfied, and I feel meaning. I feel fulfilled, which is the first cousin of happiness.

In between, I go up and down. I feel sad, anxious, lonely, angry, frustrated, and worried about money, taxes, politics, bigotry, the Trump cancer, people who hate, getting sick, or dying, the suffering in Ukraine and Myanmar, and a dozen other places.

It breaks my heart to see what human beings do to one another.

I often felt terrible and disappointed in myself, and I sometimes think of my many mistakes and troubles.

Happiness is not something that came to me in a Holy moment of Great Revelation, as happens in the movies or on TV. 

The world is just about overflowing with things that make us unhappy – power-mad and vicious men, illness, war, genocide, pandemics, violence, climate disorders, poverty, to name a few.

I sometimes crawl into my “Happiness Hole,” a silent place where I can be happy for an hour or before sticking my head up and looking around and reconnecting with the world.

Nobody finds joy or satisfaction watching the news a dozen times a day.

Happiness didn’t come from the money, fame, or success I always yearned for.

My happiness comes from inside of me, all of it. It is interior, not exterior.

I seek moments of joy and pleasure and pride; I scale down what I want and can have. I choose things within sight or reach or thought.

None of the things on my list are things I dreamt of or yearned for or thought would make me happy for most of my life.

For years, I wanted the big book or the life of the artist, or the big job, or life almost anyplace but where I was living.

I wanted fame, praise, a lot of money, the usual American measures of happiness, and glory. I wanted things other people had. I achieved some of these yearnings, at least for a time, at least in a way. I was never happy.

But a few things on a list can make me happy. Wow, are there lessons in that?

I was particularly drawn to read one of the pieces in the Atlantic, The Satisfaction Trap by Harvard Professor Arthur C. Brooks.

I thought it was wise and faithful,  partly because I hadn’t heard it before expressed in this way or thought of it, and partly because I have lived it unconsciously for some years now without realizing it.

There is a lot of truth in this piece. The best pieces do that; they make me think.

If our goal is happiness that endures, wrote Brooks, following our natural urges will not help. “That is Mother Nature’s cruel hoax,” he writes.

“Happiness doesn’t help propagate the species,” he writes, “so nature doesn’t select for it.”

He says our natural state is dissatisfaction, punctuated by brief moments of satisfaction.

Mother Nature wants us to have babies and keep on procreating. She doesn’t care if we are happy, so she didn’t build us to be satisfied. If happiness makes for more babies, great. If not, who cares?

She built us to make other humans, just like every animal or bug or bird or fish was made to do the same thing: more partners, better partners, better chances of survival for their children.

Brooks argues that happiness can come from whittling down what we want, not romanticizing or fantasizing about great success, glory, and wealth.

People don’t become happy just from making money, and they aren’t unhappy just because they have little of it.

Brooks’s list for happiness lists friendship, honor, pleasure, and agency over one’s life.

This, he says, is genuine freedom.

We live in a time when  Happiness Hawkers, as I call them, are constantly counseling us in ways to be happy – earn more, be successful,  get rid of clutter, meditate every day, live close to nature, love dogs and animals.

It’s an industry in America.

If you go to Amazon, there is no end to the number of books that will tell us how to be happy for only $20 or $40. If you Google “Happiness,” you will find 3,540,000,000 responses.

Yet if you look around you or watch the news, or ask your friends and family, you will find very few people who will tell you that they are happy or who are, in fact, happy.

The shrinks and social workers have never been busier; the Happiness Hawkers are drowning in money.

God is supposed to make people happy. But look at the mean and influential people who claim to love God. Are they happy? And God never called for happiness, only faith, and sometimes,  compassion.

The very odd thing is that I am happy. That is not a term I toss around lightly. I spent many years in misery, terror,  and sadness. Happiness was a very general idea for me.

I define happiness differently than I used to. I am not happy all of the time. Not as satisfied as I wanted to be. Not as successful. Not as brilliant.

But there is much in my life to be happy about.

I am happy when I think about it and choose to be happy because I thought long and hard about what being happy meant to me and how I could bring happiness into my life.

I never read even one of those books.

I’ve learned in my own life that happiness is not about the one big thing that will bring us to it but a series of more minor, ordinary things built into one’s life –  enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning. Work that matters.

And love, of course. But even love alone cannot bring eternal happiness. It is pretty standard for people to be in love and be unhappy. Mother Nature loves love for good reason. She gets what she wants from it.

The small rush of pleasure we may get from doing better than others can easily be undone by the unhappiness of doing worse.

The urge to have more – significantly more –  than others gnaws at us relentlessly.

In my experience, people that I know – including me – have looked to nature for happiness in our crowded and disconnected times. It’s wonderful. It’s not enough.

Countless people have told me that dogs make them happier and more fulfilled than husbands, wives, or partners.

For me, dogs are not enough for a lifetime of happiness.

I am known for writing about dogs, but I am happy to report that this is not true for me.

People make me more comfortable than dogs and happier. But dogs make me happy at times. They mean a lot to me.

They also comfort me when I am unhappy, which is a good chunk of the time. They call that being human. Helping unhappy people is now the primary work of many dogs.

While I am happier than I have ever been, my moments of happiness and pleasure are punctuated by extended moments of worry, frustration, and even anger.

I don’t expect to be happy all the time or for a long time; I look to be satisfied when I can be and choose to be.

It’s the ability to be happy that matters to me, not a single revelation or triumph that will guarantee it. I gave up on that a long time ago.

My happiness derives from that old cliche, love, but also from the things that give me pleasure – photos, movies, books, sex, a warm fire in the winter, a good meal I cooked,  a good piece I wrote, doing good, helping a refugee family eat well an older adult to have a reading light that works or a warm bathrobe for the shower.

I like the idea of Brook’s list.

As I mentioned, I have a list, mostly in my head, sometimes written down.

The natural sources of happiness have been inside, not outside.

If I were to sum it up, almost all enduring happiness for me comes from taking responsibility, facing the truth about myself, learning how to be healthy, and being creative.

As Brooks suggests, we are in a lifelong tussle with Mother Nature. She never thought to make us happy naturally; it wasn’t on her to-do list. The first humans were much too busy surviving.

But she did give us the tools to find happiness ourselves if we are willing to do the work and as we evolved.

Each of us, writes Brooks, can ride the waves of urges and dreams, hoping against hope that one day, we will find that satisfaction we all crave.

Or, he writes, we can take a shot at free will and self-mastery.

It’s a lifelong battle with the inner caveman, and often he wins. “But with determination and practice, he writes, we can find respite from that chronic dissatisfaction and experience the joy that is human freedom.“