Everyone wants to be happy. In fact, whatever we do or whatever we want is ultimately to be happy and at peace. And that’s true for everyone, everywhere, and in any experience. It’s a desire we’re born with it. A baby wants to be in the parent’s arms to be happy. A toddler wants attention or a toy to be happy. A teenager may want to be recognized by friends to be happy. An adult may want a particular relationship, position, or possession to be happy, and the list goes endless. But why does happiness seem so hard to achieve despite the variety of causes? And even when achieving any of those goals, happiness doesn’t last long. What is happiness?
To explore happiness, let’s imagine you wanted a specific car for a long while, and you finally got it after some years of planning and working hard. You feel very happy when you put your hands on the steering wheel for the first time. The happiness lasts for a day or a week when driving the car, and perhaps when you show its special features to a friend. And then three weeks later, you’re driving the same dream car to work, and you don’t feel that happiness anymore. You’re back to thinking about all your life problems while driving again. And the joy you experienced when first driving the car seems far away. What do you think has happened?
You’re driving the same car, and it still smells new. If the car was the reason for the happiness, why you’re not feeling it in three weeks while driving the same car anymore? So, there must be more to happiness than being created by the car or any other object of experience. But what is it?
To answer this question, let’s go back to the first moment of sitting in the car. When you first put your hands on the wheel, the mind, which is habitually busy thinking, pauses for a moment in the joy of completely accepting the moment. The mind, which produces thoughts incessantly, mostly wanting something to be added to the present moment or deleted from it to be liked, pauses. It pauses in befriending the moment. And you feel joy and happiness in the gap between the thoughts. Then you might talk about the car with a friend while your words are an expression of the joy within. A week later, when you’re showing the features of your new car to your friend, you feel happy again. Because the mind again is fully there, experiencing all sense perceptions without needing to change them, and lets you enjoy the moment. And three weeks later, when you’re driving the same new car to work, you’re not experiencing that happiness anymore as your mind is back to its habitual thinking, rehearsing the future or rehashing the past. You’re there, and the car is there, but the happiness isn’t.
Where did it go? Maybe it didn’t go anywhere. It’s just not felt anymore. So it seems the mind’s reaction, pausing and befriending the present moment, was the reason for experiencing happiness. The objective experience triggers the experience of happiness by opening up a gap in the stream of thoughts. The gap is the mind’s joy of accepting and appreciating the moment, exposing happiness, which is always there, waiting to be triggered. And if you look into other happy experiences of yourself, you’d see the same applies to all those experiences.
But what does it mean that happiness is always there? Imagine the spacious blue sky. The weather condition comes and goes, and it changes all the time. Sometimes, some white puffy clouds cover some parts of the blue sky, and sometimes, thick gray clouds cover up the entire spacious blue sky. But the blue sky is always there. In this analogy, the weather condition is thoughts and emotions, and the spacious blue sky is happiness. Happiness is always there, inherent in our being, and always present in the here and now. But the stream of thoughts, accompanied by emotions, covers it up. And experiencing happiness occasionally, triggered by some experiences, we assume the object of experience created it. The happiness a two-year-old experiences when jumping in a muddy puddle is the same happiness an eighteen-year-old experiences when getting accepted to the university of their choice. Happiness is always the same experience. It never changes. What changes is the situation that seemingly causes happiness to appear.
Objective experiences are like the pleasant breeze moving around the clouds, making the happy, spacious blue sky appear. They move around thoughts and make happiness between and in the background of thoughts appear. Knowing this simple truth, we can deliberately break through the heavy clouds of thoughts and emotions to be in touch with the happiness within. We just have to remember happiness is there. The human mind is conditioned to produce thoughts incessantly, and the body responds to those thoughts with feelings. And not being aware of what’s happening, we simply get caught in the circle of thought-emotion. There are many ways to break through this cycle and become the master of the mind, thinking the thought we choose to and experiencing happiness even when thinking or solving problems. Then, our thoughts would be even more useful and wise. In this way, we’d be responding to the needs of the present moment instead of reacting.
There are many ways to break through the habitual circle of thoughts-emotions, and conscious breathing is one of them. Conscious breathing is when we pause and choose to be aware of our in-breath and out-breath. It naturally opens up a gap in the stream of thoughts. Putting our attention on our breath, we can’t think simultaneously. So it simply acts like the wind moving around the clouds so that we can see a patch of happy spaciousness of the blue sky again. But we have to be aware of tricky thoughts. They sometimes sneak in when we want to open up a gap in their stream with some quiet comments like, “I feel better now. It really works.” “The breath makes me relax,” or “That doesn’t work. Who am I kidding?” All those sentences are simply thoughts. And we just have to let them pass, too.
But among all those thoughts veiling happiness, there is one saying, “Look around and see the amount of unhappiness in the world. How can I be happy?” This one usually comes out of good intentions, wishing the world to be a happier place. But it also validates unhappiness while adding guilt to any attempt to be happy. To deal with this challenging thought, imagine you want to give your best friend a gift. Can you possibly give your friend something you don’t have in the first place? You might say you’d buy something you never owned yourself. But even in this case, it’s yours for a few minutes before handing it over.
That’s how the world works. You can’t give anything to anyone if you don’t have it yourself. And that’s true for everything, including happiness. And this simple fact validates our search for happiness within so we can share it with the world through our acts or words. Considering the importance of infusing our acts or words with happiness for its individual and collective impact and knowing the true reason behind experiencing happiness, we may deliberately invite happiness into our lives. And we can make it a habit. We can put our attention to the simple experience of having our favorite tea or coffee, smelling its aroma or its taste for a moment. Focusing our attention on anything good, the stream of thought pauses for a moment in the joy of acknowledging the good present in that moment of experience. And, of course, the mind jumps in soon enough and says its opinion about that experience. It qualifies or disqualifies the object of experience by comparing it to a similar experience in the past, and then we’d be off thinking again.
Unless we consciously let that thought go and stay with that simple moment of joy for some more time. And what life is but a continuum of these small moments. Why not make it a habit to invite happiness into it? Enjoying and appreciating those moments of joy, we can also feel gratitude. Gratitude is also acknowledging the good. The experience of happiness and gratitude are interwoven, hardly separable. You don’t have to say thank you each time you feel grateful, but you feel happy and good when you are feeling grateful. You may walk in nature and acknowledge the beauty around you, and it’s an invitation to happiness. You may appreciate the beauty of an object in your hand, and that’s happiness, too. You may look into your kids’ eyes without any agenda, and that’s happiness, love, and gratitude. And I’m sure you may come up with many more examples to invite happiness into your everyday life. It’s present here and now. You just have to know where to look.