image: thomas shahan

Oil, Gold, Potatoes, Happiness, Copper

Yet a view seems to have developed that happiness is a commodity. The pursuit of happiness is enshrined as an inalienable right, like pursuing a rare and elusive bird of paradise, sometimes heard, seldom seen and sitting like a monarch perched on a raised dias composed of its own mythology.

If you ask different scholars they will tell you their prescriptive treatments for how to achieve happiness and how to cure its absence. Philosophers, mystics, magical theorists and others will massage your senses with exotic sounding formulas and esoteric practices. All of which may well be facets of the jewel that happiness is.

Then consider the universe. Something we try to make sense of, something that we have an approximate model of in our minds but which for the most part are only theories. Current thinking on dark matter, dark flow, singular and multiple universes which meet all the rigorous criteria of assessment by the scientific community suggest that everything we know is flawed. Like children trying to understand the workings of the adult mind we are wide of the mark.

This I say because there are few definitives in life, there are terrier like people who get the bit between their teeth and clamp down refusing to give an inch once their mind is made up. Yet what if their assumptions were based on inaccurate hypotheses? Or to be more prosaic, daft ideas?

And then we have this at once elusive but very tangible quality, happiness. The el Dorado of our age, the elixir to cure all life’s ills, the magic bullet. One theory doing the rounds at the moment is this: be born to wealthy established parents, receive a well rounded education at the best prep schools, primary schools, secondary schools and then attend a prestigious college while simultaneously developing a network of similarly groomed friends who can act as a supportive matrix to buttress your progress. Stay free of financial concerns, take regular time out… I think you get the picture. And on balance that may be a good happiness theory. Statistically, however, that is a prescription that fits so few of the world’s population as to be an irrelevance; especially as it writes off just about everybody else’s chance of attaining the grail, the magical cup that runneth over and enhances all with its bounty. At the other end of the happiness theory spectrum is this one: be happy. That’s it.

So having mapped out some of the territory, here is where I believe happiness fits into the equation. Human life is not arbitrary, not a happy accident – a caveat that applies to all life. Nor is it a shallow one dimensional veneer, it is a multiply aspected continuum of appearances, shifts and changes anchored by a physical body. Your physical body, despite its cell renewal and precoded cycles, is the one constant companion that shares your days.

That physical platform is the foundation for a group of different agencies that make up who or what you are. In my book The Mechanics of Happiness I refer to them as a trio or three yous, the Fixed, the Fluid and the Infinite; each of whom has dominion over specific territories that define our engagement with our lives.

The Fixed is untouchable; it’s genetics, DNA strands, chromosomes, puberty, maturation, old age. It’s all those things that are pre-programmed characteristics of our life that we can only observe, tinker with maybe, but we can’t change.

The Fluid is the workshop of your life, the anvil upon which you forge yourself. It is the place where you can affect change, it is the place where you have agency, can exercise choices and define the outcomes. This is the blank canvas upon which you construct your identity, assemble your psychologies, likes and dislikes, attitudes; it is the adventure playground where you go to gambol and cavort and whose ultimate conclusion is the person you become who can manage and interact with the world you are a part of.

The Infinite is that enigmatic quality that resides within us all. It is the human spirit, dormant, held in trust until activated by the triggers or buttons that are pushed in the Fluid arena of your life. Life is a property that permeates the universe, all universes, it is at once the most sacred and the difficult to define quality. A person may dedicate themselves to a particular commodity such as those mentioned earlier but it is this thing, life itself, that remains the most precious commodity of all. We may be agents of its appearance through procreation but life is not within our gift, we are the beneficiaries of it, its presence within our being confirms that we are endorsed by something greater than our own faltering rationale is capable of accommodating at this time.

It is only when these three are active that true happiness, a deep and abiding sense of well being, fulfilment and satisfaction may return to a person’s life. There is the temporary happiness that comes with temporary events, but the true, abiding and permanent happiness is the by product of a life spent well. Happiness is not an object in itself nor is it a worthy goal, these are mere distractions, happiness is the gift of a benign universe that is compelled to refine itself through the diversity of its expression. We are a part of that expression and our part in the arrangement is to become enhanced and thus seed the universe with greater cognizance and conscious understanding of what it is.

The universe is, in effect, a Fixed state, but we are a reflection of its urgencies to become something else, to metamorphose and transcend its own state. We are its nerve endings and each of us represents the potential to become, within that model, a neural pathway within the greater consciousness of the emerging universe. Our lives and the way that we live them represent the animation of dormant pathways. Our personal growth is the spark that leaps the synaptic gap, by analogy, as the mind of the universe forms itself around its leading edge.
So to the question, where is the leading edge of the universe now? The answer is within you and within your actions and within the man or woman you may become. That which is acceptable, because quality assurance exists throughout the universe, it’s not something we invented, it is something that we embodied from the nascent potential of the universe. We as translators of the already, embody that which exists in potential and is seeded within the universe as the blueprint of its conscious unfolding. In terms of quality assurance consider a tree and its leaves, each one perfect, a shoal of millions of fishes, each one as perfect and unique unto itself as it is of kind to its brothers and sisters.

Happiness, the permanent kind rather than the fleeting titillation, is the co-emergent residue of a state of enhanced being, of embracing the proposition of life in all its magnificence and sublimating oneself to that universal urgency. It is thorough and involves the active participation of the three yous and rather than being a destination it is in fact symptomatic of a departure point.

In the face of an onrushing tide of happiness theories, it seemed appropriate to consider the context and the setting in which true happiness may be nurtured, given succour and then sustained. The happiness of being, which is transcendent to the happiness of things.