The idea of happiness to be sure, will not sit still for easy definition; the best one can do is to try to set some extremes to the idea and then work in toward the middle.
To think of happiness as acquisitive and competitive will do to set the materialistic extreme.
To think of it as the idea one senses in, say, a holy man of India will do to set the spiritual extreme.
That holy man’s idea of happiness is in needing nothing from outside himself.
In wanting nothing, he lacks nothing.
He sits immobile, rapt in contemplation, free even of his own body, or nearly free of it.
If devout admirers bring him food, he eats it; if not, he starves indifferently. Why be concerned?
What is physical is an illusion to him.
Contemplation is his joy and he achieves it through a fantastically demanding discipline, the accomplishment of which is itself a joy within him.
Is he a happy man?
Perhaps his happiness is only another sort of illusion. But who can take it from him?
And who will dare say it is more illusory than happiness on the installment plan?
But, perhaps because I am Western, I doubt such catatonic happiness, as I doubt the dreams of the happiness-market.
What is certain is that his way of happiness would be torture to almost any Western man.
Yet these extremes will still serve to frame the area within which all of us must find some sort of balance.
Thoreau – a creature of both Eastern and Western thought – had his one firm sense of that balance.
His aim was to save on the low levels in order to spend on the high.
Possession for its own sake or in competition with the rest of the neighborhood would have been Thoreau’s idea of the low levels. The active discipline of heightening one’s perception of what is enduring in nature would have been his idea of the high.
What he saved from the low was time and effort he could spend on the high.
Thoreau certainly disapproved of starvation, but he would put into feeding himself only as much effort as would keep him functioning for more important efforts.
Effort is the gist of it.
There is no happiness except as we take on life-engaging difficulties.
Short of the impossible, as Yeats put it, the satisfaction we get from a lifetime depend on how high we choose our difficulties.
Robert Frost was thinking in something like the same terms when he spoke of “The pleasure of taking pains”.
The mortal flaw in the advertised version of happiness is in the fact it purports to be effortless.
We demand difficulty even in our games.
We demand it because without difficulty there can be no game. A game is a way of making something hard for the fun of it.
The rules of the game are an arbitrary imposition of difficulty.
When the spoilsport ruins the fun, he always does so be refusing to play by the rules.
It is easier to win at chess if you are free, at your pleasure, to change the whole arbitrary rules, but the fun is in winning within the rules.
No difficulty, no fun.
The buyers and sellers at the happiness-market seem too often to have lost their sense of the pleasure of difficulty.
Heaven knows what they are playing, but it seems a dull game.
And the Indian holy man seems dull to us, I suppose, because he seems to be refusing to play anything at all.
The Western weakness may be in the illusion that happiness can be bought. Perhaps the Eastern weakness is in the idea that there is such a thing as perfect (and therefore static) happiness.
Happiness is never more than partial. There are no pure states of mankind.
Whatever else happiness may be, it is neither in having nor in being, but in becoming.
What the Founding Fathers declared for us as an inherent right, we should do well to remember, was not happiness but the pursuit of happiness.
What they might have underlined, could they have foreseen the happiness-market, is the cardinal fact that happiness is in the pursuit itself, in the meaningful pursuit of what is life engaging and life-revealing, which is to say, in the idea of becoming.
