Looking for...

Happiness, like love, is one of those things that you just can’t look for. It has to come and find you.

In the eternally paradoxical nature of such things, the more we search and strive for it – either happiness or love – the further it seems to slip away from our finger tips like the puck on an air hockey table. If we follow that line of reasoning to its logical conclusion, the active pursuit of happiness could make us very miserable indeed.

But happiness is surely more than an absence of misery. So how do we define happiness? Contentment? A sense of belonging? Being healthy? Satisfaction with our life? Having enough money to meet our needs? Being loved and cherished? Being listened to? Having an audience? Losing ten pounds in weight? Eating jam doughnuts? Drinking beer on a sunny afternoon?

Well probably all of the above and more besides. What is for sure is that there are an awful lot of people out there in the world looking for it. A quick Google search on the word happiness brought up 67 million hits – or more than one website for every man, woman and child who lives in the UK. Among those millions of pages are also plenty of folk who are willing to teach us about how to be happy. Books, self-help groups, seminars, courses, weekend programmes and the like, all aimed at helping us to find a short cut to our own personal Nirvana. And I’m sure some of them do help too, in as much as they may help to demonstrate ways of reacting to situations, of framing our thoughts in a positive way and of choosing obtainable realistic goals.

One hundred and fifty years ago, Charles Dickens gave us one definition of happiness and misery that by chance seems highly appropriate for the credit crunch generation:

Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.

David Copperfield (1849)

Money certainly does not make people happy in and of itself, as Dickens also demonstrated with his creation of Ebenezer Scrooge in A Christmas Carol. But money probably helps, to an extent anyway, in as much as it possesses the power to insulate us from the prime factors of misery – hunger, cold, thirst, preventable or curable illness and so on. Yet we may have all the things that we need to make our material lives content laid out on the table in front of us and still feel discontented. So I’m sure that happiness is not a yacht or a sports car or a rambling old mansion house in the countryside, although the possession of those things (or of books, crayons, chocolate cake, or ice cream) may contribute significantly to our personal well being.

A sense of purpose can help us to keep on driving even when the wheels fall off our particular wagon. Having a passion – whether for fish and chip suppers, bird watching, politics, high heeled shoes or organised religion – also contributes. Research on the subject seems to suggest that around 50% of our own ‘happiness measure’ is genetic and therefore something we can do nothing about. As some are said to be born lucky, we may add with some justification that others are simply born happy.

It’s the other 50% that we have some active control over and that’s the bit that we can work on. Whether the working on is fine tuning – giving ourselves permission to relax, to read, to take time out, to spend time with friends - or much more fundamental – changing career, moving continents, leaving an unfulfilling relationship – will depend on us as individuals and our own personal circumstances.

And ultimately, being happy may not take much money or effort at all. Many years ago, my mother told her primary school pupils to go home and ask their parents what they wanted most in the world. They gave their answers in class the next day.

“All my mum says she wants,” said one little boy, “is peace and quiet and a boiled egg.”