Happiness Happens

I am sitting here at my laptop that is electronically chirping away on the library table behind the couch facing the window that frames the most spectacular view from our cabin of the high peaks above Crestone, Colorado. It is where I sit most mornings, reading the New York Times or writing, sometimes a poem, sometimes a political diatribe, sometimes an email to a friend. The finches, juncos, pinion jays, and black-headed grosbeaks are at the feeders, the snow still drapes the peaks, and I am happy.
Today my wife and I will hike up a favorite trail to a high lake where I hope to catch a cutthroat trout. Two days ago we saw thirty elk near the same trailhead where we made our first arduous attempt at reaching the lake only to find that a half mile from it we were too enervated to continue through the remaining snow near the top of our climb. The trail is dominated by aspen from start to almost tree line where a narrow band of spruce and fir shades the remaining snow. Today we will make it all the way. We are ready.
Climbing up through the aspen is like walking back in time from almost summer at the trailhead to winter at the top. The entire hike is a timeline in reverse of the coming of spring. You literally start in June and end up in March. The leaves on the aspen get incrementally smaller and smaller until they are barely buds on stark gray limbs.
I sit here happy, not at the prospect of another climb, but in the moment. Happiness happens, and it has happened to me again this morning.
Throughout most of my life I bought into the idea of the pursuit of happiness as one of the most attractive rights articulated by Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence. I always thought that happiness was something to be pursued, as a dog chases a rabbit. Now I realize that the pursuit of happiness is more like believing in the pot of gold at the end of a rainbow. The pot of gold is nothing but a fairy tale and looking for it only sets me up for disappointment. It is illusory and self-defeating to pursue happiness.
There is also a perverse notion that somehow we must earn it, and that the meaning is in the struggle. Thanks to folks like Benjamin Franklin, Horatio Alger Jr., Andrew Carnegie, and Norman Vincent Peale, we have been taught that the road to happiness is paved with a lot of hard work. Our work ethic permeates everything we do, and consequently we measure the value of our lives by how much we have earned through diligence, fortitude, and the application of human energy. Meaning is derived from the investment of our selves. We set lofty goals for ourselves and then spend most of our lives trying to achieve those goals, only to find that we fell short and had to compromise, or that circumstances interfered and we had to change direction. Gifts other than our own talents are superfluous. They may be nice, but they don’t count for much.
After more than 200 years of such nonsense, Daniel Gilbert, in his stunning book Stumbling on Happiness, has essentially proven that true happiness simply happens and is not earned. Gilbert shows us that our realizations never quite measure up to our expectations when we pursue happiness. We are therefore happiest when we stumble on it, when happiness happens.
The Danes have shown this idea of happiness to be true. They are said to be one of the happiest people on the planet because they are pleasantly surprised when good things happen. They set themselves up to be happier because they maintain low expectations rather than great ones. They may not personally achieve a great deal in terms of material measurements (although they as a culture have a very high standard of living as well as quality of life) but they are happier because they do not pursue happiness. They let it happen.
Consequently, I have a new resolution to keep so that the opportunity for happiness can happen. I will no longer pursue it. I will stumble on it; I will run across it; it will rear its pleasant surprise. I will no longer run past it in the pursuit of it. I will let it happen.