Do you want to be happy? What would it take for your happiness? After all, why are you still not happy?
These are not trivial questions. Someone abandons a successful career in the financial world to be a painter in the South Seas… A wealthy and beautiful woman leaves her rich and unattractive husband to run off with a reckless and good looking guy… A rich nation with no social problems, such as Sweden, has one of the highest suicide rates in the world… It seems as though they weren’t happy…
What does it take to be happy? Money in my pocket—many would say. As if millionaires don’t suffer from depression! A beautiful woman—says another. As if Marilyn Monroe hadn’t passed from hand to hand, without ever making any of her men happy. Got to live in the United States!—citizens under Governador Valadares sing in chorus. As if most people from that country don’t eat the bread that the devil himself kneaded with his tail…
I am reminded of the book – In Search of the Blue Bird – in which the author, a journalist, lives a nomadic life in the U.S. moving from town to town with his family looking for the ideal town where they can finally settle down and be happy. He describes their pleasant summer spent up North, but the harsh winter eventually led them to the amenities of Florida. Soon growing tired of the quiet life there, he moves to New York, where he lived for only two months after the turmoil of the megalopolis gets too unbearable. Here and there, the author speaks of his memories on his quest, like how the flowers are blue in California! How good it was ice skating in Central Park! How much fun it was raising chickens in the suburbs of Newhaven! … But none of that happens anymore where I am now…
It’s a strange thing! For someone to be happy, things have to be “different.” Incidentally, that’s why people go on strikes, riots and revolutions—to change things and bring forth—now!—the Lost Paradise that is—still—just out of our reach. I ask, is it really so impossible to find happiness within our present reality?
Huh… Reality… Who ever said that happiness and reality sail in the same boat? Do an experiment and ask ten people: “Is it possible for you to be happy in the reality you’re living right now?” Be prepared to hear a lot of nos…
Even more strange is people’s behavior. Some protest against the generalized violence that oppresses all of society, but spend hours on end watching Cops and apocalyptic TV series. Someone observes how corrupt today’s youths are, but is a regular customer at the local nightclubs full of seminude women, indulge in double entendre jokes and explicit sex scenes. That is to say, they complain about a reality in which they are already quite insiders of themselves.
It is said that, one day, the young Czar of all of Russia plunged into a deep depression. He had all the help doctors and magicians, alchemists and counselors could offer. All in vain! His depression only grew deeper. Until one day a monk told him softly, “Your Majesty, you will only have peace when you wear the shirt of a happy man…”
That was enough for the powerful ruler to seize his white steed and gallop over the frozen steppes in search of the happy man. Disappointment! Every one of his subjects said that they were unhappy: the exhaustive work, the dreadful weather, the back pains, the venomous mother in law… Everyone had their reasons for being unhappy.
One afternoon, as the sun was setting over top of the mountain peaks, the Czar saw a man tilling his land and singing Russian folk songs for his little oxe that faithfully pulled his plow. He seemed quite happy. Spurring his horse, the king of all of Russia swiftly descended the ravine and only pulled his reins once he was facing the tiller. He questioned the man:
“Are you happy?”
“Yes,” replied the peasant. “I am happy…”
“So give me your shirt!” supplicated the Czar.
And the farmer replied, “Forgive me, your Majesty, I have no shirt…”
* * *
As one American writer once said, “Happiness is not a station you arrive at, but a manner of traveling…”
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