Happiness

I have spent a good deal of time thinking about happiness.

To me, it has always seemed obvious that happiness should be one of the central goals of life. Not pleasure in the shallow sense. Not comfort at any cost. But a state of being in which life is still worth inhabiting, worth engaging, worth carrying forward.

And yet it has become clear to me that happiness is not always something one simply has.

Sometimes it is something one must choose.

There are moments in life where the choice is real. A person can decide whether to dwell on bitterness, injury, resentment, or complaint - or whether to turn instead toward gratitude, purpose, humor, love, work, beauty, or simple appreciation of being alive. In those moments, choosing happiness is both possible and wise.

But there are other moments when happiness is not immediately available as a choice.

When someone you love dies, you are going to be unhappy. That is not failure. It is reality. Grief is not a betrayal of happiness. It is part of love. The problem is not that such sorrow exists. The problem would be pretending it does not.

So I do not think the choice is always between happiness and sadness in the immediate moment.

Sometimes the choice is to grieve honestly, and then find one's way back.

That matters.

Because grief is not the enemy of happiness. It is one of the prices of love. It belongs to reality and has to be lived through. But there is another state that is more dangerous, because it can masquerade as honesty while quietly becoming a home.

Self-pity.

It is natural to feel sorry for oneself. Human beings suffer. We are injured, disappointed, frightened, exhausted, and overwhelmed. There are moments when self-pity arises almost automatically.

But there is a difference between feeling it and choosing to remain in it.

That is where the danger begins.

Because self-pity is not only pain. It is identification with pain. It is the decision, conscious or not, to keep circling one's own hurt until unhappiness becomes a kind of habitation. That is what people mean when they say someone is wallowing in self-pity.

And wallowing in self-pity is, in the end, choosing unhappiness.

Not because suffering is unreal.

But because the self has begun to cling to suffering rather than move through it.

This matters to me because the last stretch of my life has been very difficult.

My health has been bad. I have not gotten the answers I want from doctors. I have been living inside uncertainty, and uncertainty is its own burden. My parents are gone. My sister is gone. Those losses are final, and in a strange way that makes them easier to grieve, because reality has already spoken clearly. There is no bargaining with it.

But the loss of my family in another sense is harder.

I have watched people I love become part of something I regard as deeply evil. That is not a final loss in the same way death is final, and perhaps that is what makes it more painful. It is hard to surrender hope. Hard to stop imagining that they might wake up, see clearly, and realize that the foundation beneath them is quicksand. Hard to accept that people can be taken by something so destructive and still experience themselves as righteous.

And yet I know I must accept the possibility - perhaps even the likelihood - that this awakening will never come.

That is its own form of grief.

Not the grief of death, but the grief of ongoing separation, sustained by the fact that the body is still there while the shared reality is gone.

I think that is one reason choosing happiness has become such a serious discipline for me.

Not because I am blind to suffering.

But because suffering does not get to become my identity.

I can grieve and still choose not to live in self-pity.

I can feel the weight of what has been lost and still choose not to surrender the possibility of joy.

I can accept reality and still refuse to let bitterness become my permanent climate.

That is not easy.

And it is not a one-time choice.

It is often a daily one.

Sometimes more than daily.

Sometimes the choice is simply this: not to feed unhappiness more than reality already has. Not to add to sorrow the extra burden of rehearsing my injury until it becomes the center of my life.

I do not say this lightly. I say it because I have had to live it.

There are still reasons for hope.

People do wake up sometimes. I have seen enough examples to know that certainty can crack. The hold of a false system is not always permanent. But hope cannot be allowed to become another form of self-torment. If it keeps me from accepting reality as it is, then it ceases to be hope and becomes another kind of captivity.

So I think the right path is neither despair nor fantasy.

It is something harder.

To face what is real.
To grieve what is lost.
To refuse self-pity as a way of life.
And to keep choosing, where choice is still possible, the direction of happiness.

Not because happiness is always easy.

But because without it, suffering begins to govern too much.

And I do not believe suffering deserves that kind of power.

Perhaps that is one of the quiet disciplines of being alive.

To let grief be real.
To let love be real.
To let loss be real.
And still, whenever one can, to turn again toward happiness.

Not as denial.

But as allegiance.

Because life, despite everything, is still asking to be lived.