I actually attack the concept of happiness. The idea that — I don’t mind people being happy — but the idea that everything we do is part of the pursuit of happiness seems to me a really dangerous idea and has led to a contemporary disease in Western society, which is fear of sadness.
It’s a really odd thing that we’re now seeing people saying ‘write down three things that made you happy today before you go to sleep’ and ‘cheer up’ and ‘happiness is our birthright’ and so on. We’re kind of teaching our kids that happiness is the default position. It’s rubbish.
Wholeness is what we ought to be striving for and part of that is sadness, disappointment, frustration, failure; all of those things which make us who we are. Happiness and victory and fulfillment are nice little things that also happen to us, but they don’t teach us much.
Everyone says we grow through pain and then as soon as they experience pain they say, ‘Quick! Move on! Cheer up!’ I’d like just for a year to have a moratorium on the word ‘happiness’ and to replace it with the word ‘wholeness.’ Ask yourself, ‘Is this contributing to my wholeness?’ and if you’re having a bad day, it is.
We place too much weight on being happy. If we’re having a bad day, our reflex is to “cheer up!” and to remind ourselves that things “won’t always be this bad.”
We’re not allowed to stop and savor the sadness. We advise each other to “move on” in the wake of a breakup or a bad day, to “smile through the pain” even though the pain is all-encompassing and rattling. We beat ourselves down with affirmations to be happy, to stay happy and, above all, to never want anything but happiness. It’s a fallacy, I know, but we cling to it like it’s life or death.
When I stop and think back on the course of my life so far, I focus on the lows much more profoundly than I’ve ever stopped to consider the highs, not because I like being sad, but because I know enough to know just how important and life-changing those moments of sadness and lowness are.
For me, personally, the lows have brought me much more than the highs ever will. In the emptiness that I’ve been left with, I’ve found myself, lost myself, discovered myself, pampered and pleaded with myself, asked and answered questions that I was scared to know the answers to. I sat with my sadness, studied it and succumbed to it.
I let it be my biggest fear, my biggest terror and my best teacher. Sadness was like an inverse addiction, the harder and stronger I felt it, the less and less I wanted to do it. It was the propellor of my happiness. It steered me and directed me, drove me to the opposite ends of the spectrum when I needed it most. It was my biggest advocate and biggest encouragement. I wasn’t just sad. I was on my way to something better.
Alternatively, in those moments of happiness, I was just that: happy. The problem with being happy all the time is that it doesn’t teach you anything. Sure, we get a touch of happiness on our lips and we think that somehow we’re always going to crave the taste of it, that we’re always going to want more and more, that we’re always going to be hungry for it – we aren’t. We aren’t programmed for eternal happiness. We can try, but we can’t hold on to it forever.
Much as we may try to make it the axis our worlds orbit around, happiness isn’t everything. It’s meant to change, like the weather, to sink and swim and sometimes be present but more often than not, to be a fleeting emotion; to be there one second and gone the next. But in sadness, in loneliness – that’s where we find true happiness. It’s where we rebound and release.
And from sadness, we learn to be happy.
1. A BROKEN HEART
Mourning the loss of someone you love — whether it was your first, your second or your forever love — is really hard. A relationship never really dies, it just ends. You each go on, living and learning to love again, but that inebriating, soul-crushing heartbreak doesn’t ever break like the dawn does each morning.
It stays with you, envelops you and, on most days, it swallows you whole. It burns like a wound that refuses to heal and makes you feel empty with regrets and never-answered questions. It makes you yearn for just one more last try, one more do over, one more chance to get it right.
Amazingly enough, though, it’s the emptiness of the whole situation that happiness sits, waiting for you. Breakups, no matter how gruesome and gory they are, unexpectedly teach you what you want most from a partner, how far you’re willing to go and how hard you’re willing to fight. In the deafening silence, you can finally, and for the first time, hear yourself clearly.
2. DEATH OF SOMEONE YOU LOVE
Death doesn’t particularly seem like an inviting circumstance, but when we’re faced with the silence that waits for us as a space at the table sits unoccupied, a bed not slept in, a kiss not physically reciprocated we’re putting into motion one of the most basic and fundamental moments of happiness: memory.
Memories keep the people we love with us always. They’re ready at the touch, whenever we need them, enduring and all-encompassing. They’re happy, always, without the stain of sadness that has engulfed us otherwise. The promise of memories is that things won’t always be this bad; that we’ll have somewhere happy to escape to; that the people we love and have lost are never too far from us.
The happiness is the comfort of knowing you’re never alone.
3. LOSS OF A JOB, A HOME OR AN APARTMENT THAT'S COMPLETELY OUT OF YOUR CONTROL
Some things we do have control over: where we live, whom we live with, where we work and whether or not we like our coworkers. But keeping your job and holding on to your home aren’t exactly within our realm of reach.
Even though we show up every day, do work that is good and honest and true, pay our bills on time, fix the leaky faucets, pay rent — some things are just out of our control.
Being out on our own, without a life vest to catch us, is terrifying. But losing a job, a home, an apartment gives way to something bigger, even if we can’t appreciate it in the moment.
Sometimes it’s immediately after the fact and other times it comes much, much later — but the happiness is looking back on that moment and knowing you’re not there anymore. That place, that lonely hole, it wasn’t forever. It was only temporary.
4. LOSING YOURSELF - FOR A MOMENT, FOR A WEEK, FOR A MONTH
There’ve been several times so far in my story that I’ve lost myself. I’ve stopped, dead in my tracks, and wondered where I’m headed, why I’m going that way and if I even want to be destined for that place.
Most days, I don’t know and on good days, I’m faintly sure I’ve make the worst decision of my lifetime so far. Every day is a new challenge, a new chance to get it wrong, another opportunity to question any- and everything that I’ve done up until this point.
There’s something, though, that’s just so incredibly awe-inspiring and magical about being lost, about not knowing what comes next, about leaving it all up to fate and chance and opportunity and the excitement of a spot on a map that brings with it all the hopefulness of a lifetime.
It’s sadness — it’s always sadness — that teaches you how to be happy!
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