stamp my gross happiness visa!

It is much harder to be happy than unhappy. Why is that? Ask anyone. Go ahead. I dare you. Ask them if they are really, truly happy. Chances are you’ll get a few people who put on a brave face, smile and tell you what they think you want to hear. Don’t let that be the end of the conversation. Push them to go deeper and tell you what’s really going on.

Most people are struggling to make ends meet, dealing with dysfunctional families, friends and/or crappy unfulfilling jobs. It seems like most everyone is just trying to make it through the day until they can get home, turn off their minds relax and float down the television stream. That’s not happiness if you ask me.

It is so much easier to allow the detritus of modern life to fall all around, building up a wall that corrals us in with our unhappiness than it is to be the wrecking ball that swings and just might let in some splinters of light through the cracks it struggles to break. Happiness requires work. Happiness only reveals itself to the vigilant and determined. Unhappiness is easy. It is lazy and requires no work ethic at all. It makes itself available to us whether we like it or not.

I try really hard to be happy. Unfortunately I don’t quite get there most of the time. Little things plant themselves in front of me and set me right off the course of having a perfectly sunshine day. I can be walking down the hall with a smile on my face singing “I Feel Good” and then my hand will slam directly into the hall closet doorknob. Maybe I’ll be watching the newborn baby goats stumbling around acting all cute like and my foot steps into a pile of dog crap. I might be right in the middle of some hard found inspiration, writing the greatest song since “Across the Universe” when all of a sudden my B string breaks and I don’t have a replacement set anywhere.

The old cliché “nothing good comes easy” is a cliché for good reason. It’s true. It may appear that some people don’t have to work as hard as others for their happiness. I don’t believe that’s true. If you equate happiness with material things, then maybe it is. But I have known quite a few “trustifarians” that have never had to work a day in their blue blooded lives because of family money and I can tell you, it’s pretty rare to find someone in that position who smiles so deeply it can change the mood of a room. Put me on stage next to an eighty five year old bluesman belting out “Crossroads” for the ten thousandth time and I’ll show you some happiness at its purest form.

There is a Buddhist retreat up the road from here that has an interesting approach to enlightenment and happiness. You hear the word “retreat” and the images that rise up are massages, cucumber slices on your eyes, steam baths and never ending piles of rich, delicious food. Not at this place. Every time I have driven by, the property has been spotlessly clean and beautiful. The lawn and shrubbery are perfectly manicured, there is not one spec of dirt or bird poop on any of the surrounding statues, and all of the hundreds of prayer flags have not faded one iota from their original bright and beautiful orange hue. Do you think that it’s the Dalai Llama that keeps the place so clean?

The path to happiness according to their philosophy is achieved through hard work. When you sign up to spend some time there, you leave all of your worldly trappings behind. No laptops, iPods-Pads-Phones, clothes and no satellite television receivers. You put on one of their beautiful orange robes and start getting it dirty. Apparently all of the stress and aggravation brought into our lives by technology, supposedly to provide the assistance to a faster and easier life, can be erased and soothed away by good old fashioned dirty knees, sweaty brows and sore muscles.

King Jigme Singye Wangchuck of the country of Bhutan was so concerned with the happiness of his people that he created the concept of Gross National Happiness. He developed it as a way to measure his countrymen’s quality of life. Imagine that. A leader so concerned that his subjects were happy and fulfilled, he actually created a system to measure the amount of happiness, contentment or sorrow of their daily lives. If they were unhappy, he and the government would actually take steps to remedy their problems. Where do I sign up for a Happiness Visa?

It seems like we here in the Western world are in love with our stoicism. In order to fit in we are not able to smile. Think about it. If you are walking down the street and someone walks toward you with a huge, shit eating grin on their face, you’re first instinct is to give them a wide birth as they pass. We are much more likely to accept someone with their head down, frown on their face quick stepping their way to their next miserable appointment with other miserable people.

We don’t want to see happy people. Maybe because it reminds us of how unhappy we might be and how much work we have in store for us if we want to raise the corners of our mouth and show those pearly off-whites.

Children laughing
Baby’s cooing
Wisps of clouds slowly swimming across an ocean blue sky
A gentle breeze caressing your skin
A hearty belly laugh that hits you so hard you see stars
Puppies
Kittens
The smell of freshly baked chocolate chip cookies…
Other stuff that cynical me would normally roll my eyes at.

I guess these are some little things that may counteract the slammed doorknob hand or dog crap foot. I have to work harder in my life to remember them when I need to. I know I do. Even if we discover that reincarnation is a possibility, we only get one shot at this particular go around. If it’s going to be happy ride, it needs to be one that's worked for and earned.

So I’m going to head outside and look at the new baby goats for a minute and then play some fetch with the dogs. I’m going to smile more. I’m going to work harder.

What are you gonna do?

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