Here’s to a Happiness-filled New Year!

Much of the world outside the house is frost covered, from grass stems to tree crowns. I have not doubt that, at some point soon, we’ll again be covered by snow instead of frost, but not yet. Some day soon we may even get another glimpse of something called sunshine.

a frost-covered landscape

Photo by J. Harrington

I recently started rereading a book that was copyrighted ten years ago and first published January 1, 2015. It’s titled Sustainable Happiness and was edited by the folks at YES! magazine. The difference with this reading is that I’m leaning heavily toward actually following the book’s guidance. The first reading, years ago, was more an exploratory adventure. For better or worse, I’m beginning to believe, or at least accept as true, a number of the principles I’ve read over the past couple of decades. That has prompted me to change. Remember the old line about “Doc, it hurts when I do this.” Doc replies: “Don't do it!” If most of what I do is find fault, I’m blocking my own road to happiness. My new-found motivation is that I can think of few things more likely to crush Republicans and fascists than the rest of US becoming happy. This approach is just an enlargement on the old wisdom “Living well is the best revenge.”

Sustainable happiness is one way to measure “living well.” Others can be found in the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and the Genuine Progress Indicator. Of course, most of this derives from Donella Meadows work on places to intervene in a system. Are we perhaps rediscovering some of the wisdom of Jefferson when he insisted that the Declaration of Independence include the phrase “pursuit of happiness?”

So Much Happiness

Naomi Shihab Nye     1952 – 

It is difficult to know what to do with so much happiness.
With sadness there is something to rub against,
a wound to tend with lotion and cloth.
When the world falls in around you, you have pieces to pick up,
something to hold in your hands, like ticket stubs or change.

But happiness floats.
It doesn’t need you to hold it down.
It doesn’t need anything.
Happiness lands on the roof of the next house, singing,
and disappears when it wants to.
You are happy either way.
Even the fact that you once lived in a peaceful tree house
and now live over a quarry of noise and dust
cannot make you unhappy.
Everything has a life of its own,
it too could wake up filled with possibilities
of coffee cake and ripe peaches,
and love even the floor which needs to be swept,
the soiled linens and scratched records . . .

Since there is no place large enough
to contain so much happiness,
you shrug, you raise your hands, and it flows out of you
into everything you touch. You are not responsible.
You take no credit, as the night sky takes no credit
for the moon, but continues to hold it, and share it,
and in that way, be known.

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