Vibrant Nation

As I’ve mentioned before, sometimes life has to keep sending me the same message in different forms to get my attention. Lately they have been about different forms of happiness. I’m assuming I didn’t pay to much attention at first because ‘happiness’ is such a vague concept. We all know what it feels like to be happy, but for the most part life happens in the middle of the happy/unhappy spectrum where we are neither ecstatic nor depressed.

Somewhere in the process I came across a book called The Geography of Blissby NPR reporter Eric Weiner. I had heard people talk about it and thought it was a book of travel essays, so got the book to see what he had to say. It turned out to be a study of what different cultures consider to constitute happiness, and surprisingly, there are major differences. What makes people happy in one culture, such as the freedom from lots of rules, is incredibly painful to another culture where proscribed social order is what makes every one feel safe and happy. I had assumed that much as sadness is a common human condition, so was happiness. To be fair, the book doesn’t measure the sensation of happiness, so that could be standard, it simply looks at what a group of people need to have in place for them to be aware that they are happy.

This sent me down the path of thinking about the daily happinesses we experience. If we felt elated all the time, simple pleasures would have no power to move us, so came to the conclusion that we move around the middle ground of happiness much of the time, which is what makes us so aware of great happiness or sadness when it arrives.

I started looking around for the things that bring micro-bursts of happiness into life, the leavening that makes an ordinary day a bit brighter. Often it can be opening the curtains to see sunshine and blue skies, and since it is spring here, the bursts of bird song and daily appearances of new flowers and foliage have provided bursts of happiness. Happiness also comes from spontaneous acts of kindness by others, letting a driver change lanes or out of a side road, doing an unexpected small favor , from sharing humor and the broad grin of someone who has realized that the day is good.

I’m sure there are many psychological studies into happiness, but I prefer the questionnaire approach to finding out what is going on inside my head! I found this downloadable booklet from MetLife called,Discovering What Matters: Your Guide to the Good Life. Since it is from an insurance agency, it has a vested interest in helping you contemplate your future and how you plane to finance it, but is also asks some good questions about how happy you now are in different areas of your life. Having answered the questions and got totals, it asks you what you plan to do to make the less happy areas of your life more happy in the future.

While the bottom line is that we are each responsible for creating our own happiness, it doesn’t hurt to have some help in identifying the areas we need to work on first.

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