Strive to be happy?
Nearly two and a half years ago I wrote an introductory post for this blog, which I faux-modestly called “a preamble (or perhaps just a ramble.)” I was in my last year of university at the time and almost euphoric about writing something that wasn’t an essay - something which could be rich and florid and self-important rather than clear, tightly argued and concise. Reading it back now, I can feel the same feeling of having overindulged as I did when I first finished writing it, like the physical sensation of having gorged yourself on something pleasurable which you’re now stuck having to digest. It makes me want to close my laptop and go out into the street, breathe in the fresh April air and feel the sun on my eyelids.
Two and a half years on, I HAVEN’T written the series of online essays about the ethical anxieties of 21st century life (structured around the themes of Matthew Arnold’s 1867 poem Dover Beach) I once grandly envisaged. Instead, I spent a few months embroiled in the culture wars, half-arsed an MA (doing precisely the minimum amount of work necessary to scrape a merit and preserve my increasingly fragile amour propre), went to volunteer in a dog shelter in Moldova instead of writing my dissertation, stumbled into an active war zone and only left it nine days later, spent a few months waitressing to save up for future STUPID escapades, went back to Moldova to volunteer with Ukrainian refugees, and later ended up in Cyprus volunteering with (mostly Nigerian, Cameroonian and Congolese) asylum seekers. I’m waitressing again now, a live-in job in a hotel on the Hampshire coast, while I save up for a few months of hiking in Wales and (hopefully) Armenia this summer.
I’ve decided to start writing this blog again, hopefully more regularly, because I made a friend in Cyprus who grew up in Belfast with a Protestant father and a Catholic mother, and she introduced me to a poem which has become a sort of pattern for my life - she and her siblings grew up having it quoted at them whenever they misbehaved. It’s the kind of poem which is printed on tea towels and cited as transformative by celebrities on Oprah, and as disappointingly unoriginal as this might make me, it shuddered into my brain like a lightening bolt at precisely the moment I needed to hear it. It’s called Desiderata, a prose poem published in 1927 by an obscure American writer called Max Ehrmann which took the inspirational poster industry by storm.
Source: https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/desiderata-6/
Every time I read these lines I find one which has taken on new meaning or relevance to something going on in my life. It’s the last line, though, which I find myself repeating when I notice I’m getting short-tempered or lazy (a sadly common occurrence.)
Be cheerful. Strive to be happy.
I probably would have dismissed these words immediately if I hadn’t reached just the point of spiritual fatigue I had when I heard them for the first time. Instead I listened to Anna read them off her phone as we huddled around a brazier under a smoky, noisy awning in the untarmacked backstreets of Nicosia - I was slightly unsteady with fatigue, the emotion of an intense few weeks of volunteering, and imported Greek beer; and their simplicity seemed comforting rather than patronising. The part of me that would normally have responded, oh, really? Just be cheerful and strive to be happy? That’s where I’ve been going wrong all these years, thank Christ you told me! was inexplicably absent. Instead I heard the words as I think perhaps the author meant them, as a simple, elegant formulation of what is actually quite a complicated thesis about human happiness: that being cheerful is an attitude we can and should choose to adopt, but that actually being happy requires more. Being happy requires effort sustained over time, even if it doesn’t depend on reaching any one goal, e.g. that job, that house, that university. It’s the sum of every good choice we make and it lasts just as long as we continue to make them. Happiness is about consistently choosing to do the things that make life worth living over the things that only just about make it bearable.
Perhaps this sounds crazy, or just rather a lot to get from a tea towel poem. But I do think it’s there to be got.
Since I got back from Cyprus, I have been consciously trying to make those everyday decisions which gradually grow into happiness. And I fail CONSTANTLY. It’s strange but true that human beings will almost always choose what’s easy over what’s good for us, as if we momentarily forget that there’s a difference and then keep forgetting it, again and again and again. Writing isn’t easy but it does me good to feel that my brain is engaged and I am interested in the world, even if it’s deeply frustrating in the moment to try to put your thoughts and impressions down on paper. The trouble with WRITING about politics or ethics or culture or any other complicated thing (as opposed to just thinking about them) is that the page is like a photograph taken in harsh light, and re-reading it means seeing all the flaws in your reasoning glaring sullenly back at you. In your mind, you can tell yourself that this inconsistency or that contradiction is not such a problem as one might think - you will doubtless find a solution in due course. On paper, you have to admit the problem like a student squirming before a full lecture theatre. As the silence stretches on, you become less and less confident in your (hitherto unquestioned) ability to smudge over the difficulties - until you either give up on doing so and actually try to figure out what’s wrong with your argument or you produce something which is entirely without merit. Luckily for you, should you end up doing the latter, someone will almost certainly point it out to you on the internet.
I have seen (and done) quite a few things in the last few years which I don’t know how to make sense of, things I don’t know how to write or even think about. But I would like to be better. So over the next few weeks (before I leave for Wales with my bivvy bag and not much else), I am going to use this space to try and figure it out.