Happiness in two easy steps

Tuesday's breakfast: Lemon tea bread and coffee. I like how sophisticated and classy "tea bread" sounds. I made mine with this recipe. However, it's probably close to blasphemous to eat it, like I do, with coffee.

Oh, that ever-elusive happiness! Trying to catch it is like trying to catch air with a butterfly net. Time and time again, we fool ourselves, thinking it can be done, we need only the last missing ingredient: A new job/partner/pair of jeans/therapist/hair color or we need to lose X amount of pounds or go on vacation to somewhere warm or make it on Broadway or pass the last exam. To all of this I say “Wrong, wrong, wrong!” That’s not it, not at all. I know, because I have found true happiness! Yes, that’s right. Can you imagine? And it wasn’t very hard either, and the curious thing is that it was right at the same place where it was last time I saw it. Seems happiness doesn’t move fast.

Step 1. Before I go into explaining how you, too, can find true happiness, I need to talk a little bit about greed. If ever there was such a thing as a “happiness blocker”, then it must be greed. The absurd thought or feeling that we want or need more. I don’t know where that started, or how, but it is a contagious, stubborn thing and it has spread to most parts of the world, at least if you ask me. It was alive and well in Sweden, when I was there last year, and it is blossoming here in the U.S. Seriously, who really needs more than one winter coat? Who really needs a fifteenth pair of jeans? Who really needs a special storage container for their citrus fruit or a new salad spinner? I could go on and on. My point is that this sort of greed stands in the way of real happiness, so you have to fight it – tooth and nail. Those shoes are very pretty but they are not going to bring you happiness, trust me. Only when you have this greed under control can you proceed to step 2, which is much more exciting than any new “thing” anyway.

Step 2. I want you now to think about when you were a child. Not a small child, but you know, pre-teen perhaps. Or maybe even a teenager, which was the case for me. The reason for going back to our childhood is, that as children we, hopefully, haven't yet been exposed to much falsities and lies and our feelings are usually purer. Anyway, I want you to think about the things you did as a child, zooming in on the things you did that made you happy. This is an important step, because this is the blueprint, the most basic image, of your real happiness, so don’t skip it, and try to really get at it. It may not come to you right away. I’ll help you a bit, by telling you about my own image, and also how I found true happiness.

One fall evening, when I was 18 or 19, I was sitting in the library listening to some music. In those days, you could go to the music section at Lund Public Library, where there were sets of headphones attached to these small tables and where you’d walk up to the counter and ask for a certain album to be played. So I was doing just that. And the woman at the counter mixed up my music with someone else’s, so I had to go back and tell her to change, which she of course did. And on my way back to my spot and my headphones is when it struck me: The enormous realization that I was completely, fully, and unbelievably happy! That “my cup runneth over” as it says in the Bible. There I was, in my old corduroy pants and leaky boots and orange sweater, and my hair wasn’t perfect and I had very little money and no boyfriend and I had to bike home in the cold darkness, and still I was perhaps the happiest person in the world! I couldn’t believe it! It happened while I was walking from the counter telling the librarian to change my music, to the table where my headphones were. And it happened just like that! It was a most amazing, freeing sensation. Like floating on air. Like being above one’s self.

Tut tut, you say. What 19-year old is NOT happy! And I would’ve agreed with you a year or so ago, but you see last spring I went back to that same library and dipped into that same exact feeling. And I am no longer 19. What I am getting at is the action that’s the root of happiness, the doing that brings about happiness. That’s why I said you have to find something you did as a child that made you happy. There’s this amazing little book called The Mystic in the Theater* by Eva Le Gallienne about the Italian actress Eleonora Duse, in which Duse says: “The soul’s joy lies in doing”.

I didn’t connect the dots until last spring, when I found myself back in Sweden and on a spur decided to go take a class at Lund University, my alma mater, again. True, I had had some not so good years, and I wasn’t especially happy with my work, which I found tedious and boring. But I was not at all prepared to step into the very same happiness as the one I had experienced 20 years earlier. But I did, and it happened at that same library, you could say the library acted as the channel or funnel for my happiness. I was reserving my seat in the reading section by putting down my jacket, and the second I rose it hit me again. That happiness. The incredulous sensation of utter happiness. It didn’t take me long to realize, that the “active, magic verb”, the doing, that brings forth my happiness, is “studying”, and in particular “writing” as I was writing a thesis on both occasions. Hence: Writing makes me happy. It was like picking up the easy, carefree heart beat of my childhood.

You need to find your own active, magic verb and I know you will and I know it will bring you absolute and true happiness. It may be baking, it may be gardening, it may be dancing, it may be translating the letters of Saint Augustine of Hippo, doing pottery, or playing the piano – for all I know, it may even be birdwatching. Only you can find it. But remember Eleonora Duse: “The soul’s joy lies in doing.” Know for sure that it has to be something you do, not something others do for you. I am also convinced that it mustn’t be “going to the movies” or “listening to Mozart” or things like that, because it’s too passive. It’s got to be an “active” verb, something you yourself do. Happiness lies in doing.

Once you find your image of happiness, the only thing left to do is DO IT! Execute it! Do it for the world to see (or not), but do it with all your heart and all your might and revel in doing it!

 *I am wary of handing out book recommendations, because I too have a long list of books that I want to read. But should you ever come across this thin book, 185 pages of bliss, about the obscure, mysterious Eleonora Duse then do yourself a favor and buy it. Tuck it away somewhere if you don’t have time to read it now. One day you will, and it will lead you even further on your way to happiness. Above, my own worn copy bought in NYC in 1997.