Have you heard of The Happiness Project? It’s a book, and it’s spawned some sort of mini movement. I only know about it because I’ve seen the book on the bestseller shelf at the book store, and I’ve seen people undertaking their own personal Happiness Projects and journaling about them online. I haven’t read the book, and don’t have any plans to. It’s not that I don’t value happiness or believe in happiness, it’s just that I don’t think there’s any formula for happiness that can be found in a book. And frankly, I think happiness is overrated. Or at least misunderstood.
Why is “happiness” and positivity so important in our culture? More to the point, why are people so repelled by dark, or negative emotions?
What is happiness, anyway? How is it defined and quantified? I suppose happiness can be summed up as fulfillment and contentedness, if not outright bliss. Bliss, I think everyone can agree, tends to be very fleeting. Fulfillment and contentedness can have more staying power, but life is such a melting pot of experiences and circumstances that it seems nearly impossible to find and maintain fulfillment and contentedness in all areas of one’s life simultaneously for any really significant period of time. You may feel content in your marriage, for instance, but not so much at work. You may feel fulfilled with your relationships with your family, but maybe not with other people in your life.
And the ugly truth is, awful things happen in life. People you thought you could count on let you down, jobs get lost, money runs out, loved ones die, kids make bad choices, marriages fall apart, plans fall apart, dreams fall apart.
But apparently what we’ve come to expect of ourselves and each other is that what you do in the wake of all life’s crap is keep a smile on your face and think positive. See the bright side. That is what we’ve deemed strength and resilience. Anything less is seen as weakness, failure. People are lauded and admired for seemingly turning the shit into sunshine in life. It’s reassuring; it makes us believe that nothing can be so bad as to completely undo us. When someone asks, “How are you doing?” even in the midst of hard times, what they really want to hear is “I’m okay, I’m good.” Why is this? Probably partly because we’re all so busy with our own lives and problems that we really don’t have time to get wrapped up in someone else’s problems. But I think at the core of our distaste for negative emotions is fear. We don’t know what to do with someone else’s negative emotions, let alone our own. There is a fear of losing control of ourselves, our lives, if we give ourselves over to dark feelings. So we strive for these false symbols of happiness and resilience.
I can’t help but call up memories of being lectured by a group of friends a couple years back about choosing happiness. This was directly following the end of my husband’s year-long cancer treatment, which, it goes without saying, put our entire family through the wringer. And the end of his treatment, wasn’t the end of the ripple effects of his cancer. Needless to say, I was not in the best place emotionally then, and being someone who has always worn her heart on her sleeve, my emotions were out there for everyone to see: I was wrung out, angry, depressed, and scared. And what I got were some lectures on choosing happiness.
I thing it’s very typical and symptomatic of our culture’s general, collective distaste for dark, negative emotions. We’re all after a quick fix for what ails us, we all want to feel good, and to be around people who seem to feel good and who, in turn, make us feel good. Feeling good, even if it’s only on the surface, makes us feel safe.
I have a deep respect and appreciation for the dark emotions, however. When I was making up my mind to have an unmedicated home birth after having had four medicated hospital births, I did a lot of reading about natural childbirth. In all my reading, there was a common thread about respecting the hard work one’s body does to give birth, about surrendering to the pain and riding the waves of it, knowing that they come and go and that in the end, the pain and sweat and utter labor will result in a beautiful gift. Although not everyone might appreciate the comparison, I think allowing ourselves to fully feel all of our emotions, including the dark ones, can be equally transformative. This is how we learn about ourselves, about what we’re really made of, about gratitude and hope and joy. It is empowering. Happiness is not about suppressing or doing away with the bad emotions, it’s about allowing a place for them.
I believe with all my heart that my life is richer for all of my experiences, good and bad. Joy and gratitude cannot be fully experienced without understanding and appreciating grief, sorrow, fear, despair, and anger. We are all the sums of our entire lives; every event and emotion we experience shapes us. Though I would gladly never see another hard time visited upon me or my family again, I know there will be more hard times ahead, and the only real key to any measure of happiness is to experience it all, fully and mindfully, with respect and reverence.