Be happy, don’t worry …
Appreciating the things that make you happy could be the key to contentment
LET ME START with a disclaimer. I know I should be happy and it’s utterly indulgent even to be thinking about not being so, given that I have a roof over my head, three healthy children, good health, a career and a thousand other things – which my mother would certainly list for you – to be grateful for.
But if someone asks me “Are you happy?” the word ‘yes’ emerges a little hesitantly from my mouth, and inside there’s a throb of doubt that rapidly escalates into a silent scream: “No! This is not how it’s supposed to feel even though I have everything I really wanted.”
Of course I don’t have everything I ever wanted, because what you want changes. When I was a teenager, happiness eluded me in the shape of a pair of tight denim jeans. Not just any pair of jeans, but a faded pair of skin tight Levi’s 501s that clung to every curve.
This was the first of many garment fantasies in which an item of clothing, always just beyond the reach of pocket money / Christmas envelope from an aunt / Saturday job / salary / credit card limit, would change my life irrevocably for the better. When I actually achieved the Levi’s, several fashion cycles later, I never wore them, because by then I really wanted a Nicole Farhi leather coat.
Perhaps that’s the thing with happiness. Maybe we’re programmed to desire something with a passion that makes life almost unbearable without it, and then when we get it we’re straight off in search of the next thing. Perhaps it’s the eternal quest that keeps our species evolving (as well as designers in profit …). I make a point of buying skintight jeans for all my friends’ daughters now.
My father used to ask me: “Would you rather be Socrates dissatisfied, or a pig satisfied?” when he wanted to sharpen up my logic. Well, little piggy actually, because from my encounters with Socrates he always seemed so pompous and miserable. Struggling with gloomy tomes of happiness according to Plato, Aristotle or John Stuart Mill brought me little enlightenment. Although I do remember chancing upon the secret of happiness at university with some friends, but being too drunk to remember what it was the next morning. We might have been debating, between bottles of Pils, whether happiness would consist of career success, simple riches or just fame. (At a recent reunion the only thing we were all concerned about now was our weight . So much for further education.)
Back then, I was rather keen on the money idea, but when someone asked how much it would take to make me happy, my riches immediately became another source of anxiety. Once I started imagining wonderful apartments in New York, Paris and London, I also wanted one in Rome, as well as one on Lake Como or even Capri (why not?), and what with all the hired help and shoes in all those places, the sums involved were almost distasteful.
In my twenties I knew I would be happy if I had a successful career and a lovely flat where I could have dinner parties with my friends. Now, in my thirties, I thought the secret might be found in a simpler and less materialistic way of life. So I sold my business, gave up my loans and the whole ambition thing, and decided to become a full-time mum.
As soon I had cooked the thirteenth Jamie Oliver lunch, I was restless for something to do. Laura, a friend who is enviably successful in television, has two homes and a partner she adores, but says that she sometimes wishes she could just disappear and start again with a completely clean slate. Is this something everyone feels, or is it peculiar to our generation of women who are able to have it all, without too much of a fight, but suddenly find that we don’t want anything after all?
One of the truly fulfilling things that I have done in my life was having children, but the heady combination of joy, fear, fascination and exhaustion was not exactly what I imagined pure happiness to be.
I remember the first night in hospital after my first-born lay beside me in his little Perspex pod. I watched him in awe and wondered if I was ever going to be a good enough parent for him. And when he began to cry, I took him into my bed and talked to him, this tiny human being, and it felt like the beginning of a great friendship, full of wonderful promise, but also very scary.
Does happiness have to be a sustained state? Yes, says my friend Chrissie concisely — happiness implies something longer than an orgasm. When I imagine what it might feel like, I think of a glorious continuum of freedom from anxiety. Is it just me or is there just more to worry about these days? Not just how personal pension plans work, and whether or not to have Botox injections when the time comes (even worse, has it come already and I haven’t noticed?), but also the big ones like terrorism and biological warfare. I actually sometimes worry about worrying. And I worry whether it would be right to be happy anyway in a world that is so full of injustice.
The psychologist Dorothy Rowe, (in her book Wanting Everything: The Art of Happiness) advises taking responsibility for ourselves and practising kindness, tolerance and sharing. I’m sure that’s the sensible long-term route to happiness, but I’m inclined to agree with the novelist John McGahern, who says that happiness cannot be “sought or worried into being or even fully grasped. It should be allowed its own slow pace so that it passes unnoticed if it ever comes at all”. Mind you if I could write like McGahern, then maybe …
For the moment, I shall just have to settle for moments of sheer joy that happen at the most unlikely times. The other day, my youngest and I were sitting on the sofa together watching Friends. “Mum.” he said, “she looks just like you!” I laughed: “Well, thank you. Do you know how many people think that she’s the most gorgeous woman in the world?” He turned to me as innocent as an angel and said: “You are the most gorgeous woman in the world.” A moment? The wonder of the feeling went on for so long that it might almost have been happiness. It even survived the quite disproportionately loud and sustained laughter of his teenage brother …
