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| Photo by Jan Tinneberg on Unsplash |
“Happiness occurs when you forget who you’re expected to be. And what you’re expected to do. Happiness is an accident of self-acceptance. It’s the warm breeze you feel when you open the door to who you are.”
—Matt Haig, The Comfort Book
“We have the capacity to build happiness into our lives with humor, concern for others, and gratitude. Of course, we can’t do it all of the time. That self-expectation would drive us crazy. However, we can develop habits that make it more likely that we will respond in an upbeat manner.
“It’s critical to distinguish between choosing to live lovingly and cheerfully and living a life of denial. One leads to joy, the other to emotional death.”
—Mary Pipher, Women Rowing North: Navigating Life’s Currents and Flourishing as We Age
When the world becomes as horrifying and tragic as it feels right now, I tend to despair and retreat. Realistically, what can I possibly do to ease the suffering of people in Haiti or Afghanistan? To comfort the family grieving for someone lost to COVID? I’ve been paralyzed by the scope of need, and by feeling personally burned out to the point where I feel unable to do anything.
My inconveniences and irritations pale in comparison to the genuine suffering around me. It feels almost sacrilegious to seek and write about happiness. But I know the life I have is a gift, and I don’t want to waste it. Here are a few thoughts I’ve been pondering as I try to take in what is happening in the world, and figure out what I can do to help others as well as live my own precious gift of a life to the fullest. Maybe you will find some inspiration or comfort from these words, too.
“Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.”—Marie Curie
“Most misunderstandings in the world could be avoided if people would simply take the time to ask, ‘What else could this mean?’”—Shannon L. Alder
“If it is true that a chain is only as strong as its weakest link, isn’t it also true a society is only as healthy as its sickest citizen and only as wealthy as its most deprived?”—Maya Angelou, Even the Stars Look Lonesome
“When our hearts are small, our understanding and compassion are limited, and we suffer. We can’t accept or tolerate others and their shortcomings, and we demand that they change. But when our hearts expand, these same things don’t make us suffer anymore. We have a lot of understanding and compassion and can embrace others. We accept others as they are, and then they have a chance to transform.”—Thich Nhat Hahn
“Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.”—Leo Tolstoy
“Anger is often what pain looks like when it shows itself in public.”—Krista Tippett
“Worry is useful when it changes our behavior in productive ways. The rest of the time, it's a negative form of distraction, an entertainment designed to keep us from doing our work and living our lives.”—Seth Godin
“Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.”—Theodore Roosevelt
“We think the choice is between doing something big or something small. But really, it’s between doing something small or nothing at all.”—Lorenzo Gravina, “The Value of Doing a Little.”
Recently I read the 1939 classic novel Mrs. Miniver (Amazon, Bookshop). And while the society we live in has changed a lot since then, I was struck by how spot on some of the passages were to the times in which we live. For instance:
“…Mrs. Miniver was beginning to feel more than a little weary of exchanging ideas (especially political ones) and of hearing other people exchange theirs. It’s all very well, she reflected, when the ideas have had time to flower, or at least to bud, so that we can pick them judiciously, present them with a bow, and watch them unfold in the warmth of each other’s understanding: but there is far too much nowadays of pulling up the wretched little things just to see how they are growing. Half the verbal sprigs we hand each other are nothing but up-ended rootlets, earthy and immature: left longer in the ground they might have some to something, but once they are exposed we seldom manage to replant them. It is largely the fault, no doubt, of the times we life in. Things happen too quickly, crisis follows crisis, the soil of our minds is perpetually disturbed. Each of us, to relieve his feelings, broadcasts his own running commentary on the preposterous and bewildering events of the hour: and this, nowadays, is what passes for conversation.”
Substitute pandemic for war in this section:
“And it oughtn’t to need a war to make us talk to each other in buses, and invent our own amusements in the evenings, and live simply, and eat sparingly, and recover the use of our legs, and get up early enough to see the sun rise. However, it has needed one: which is about the severest criticism our civilization could have.
“I wonder whether it’s too much to hope that afterwards, when all the horrors are over, we shall be able to conjure up again the feelings of these first few weeks, and somehow rebuild our peace-time world so as to preserve everything of war which is worth preserving. What we need is a kind of non-material warm museum, where, instead of gaping at an obsolete uniform in a glass case, we can press a magic button and see a vision of ourselves as we were while this revealing mood was freshly upon us.”
When the pandemic first began, I felt a sense of camaraderie, a spirit of “We’re all in this together.” While there were incidents of stunningly selfish behavior, there were also incidents of kindness, encouragement, and a desire to protect others. Now…not so much. We are all weary from the constant barrage of opinion, science that changes and evolves as health experts learn more about this novel virus, and fear that we or someone we love will become seriously sick or even die.
I wish I had the answers to the problems we’re facing. What I’m trying to do is be the person who makes the situation better (not the person who makes the situation worse), by posting positive and uplifting content, and by trying to be personally responsible in my daily actions. I’m seeking comfort in the words of those who’ve come before, whether in a novel written in the 1930s, or in the words of mental health experts who share ways to cope with our new normal. I’m hoping to offer comfort and encouragement in the words I speak and the words I share here on Catching Happiness.
If you’re feeling discouraged, sad, or worried, my heart goes out to you. If there’s anything you’d like to see on Catching Happiness that would lift your spirits, please share in the comments below or message me privately at kathyjohn335 [at] gmail [dot] com. And go find yourself a copy of Mrs. Miniver—it’s a mood lifter!
“You can’t be happy unless you can also be sad. If you’re defended against feeling pain, those same defenses shut down your access to joy. You have to let everything in.”
—Alison Bechdel, “Alison Bechdel: ‘I've
Always Know Physical Exertion and Movement Are Vital Somehow for My Creative
Process.’”
For the next couple of weeks I’ll be taking a break from posting on Catching Happiness. I’m finally traveling to California to see my moms and will have limited computer access. I’m planning to indulge in some of my favorite simple pleasures and everyday adventures!
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| Photo by Denise Jones on Unsplash |
“Indeed, man wishes to be happy even when he so lives as to make happiness impossible.”
—Saint Augustine
“You will always struggle with not feeling productive until you accept that your own joy can be something you produce. It is not the only thing you will make, nor should it be, but is something valuable and beautiful.”
—Hank Green, A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor
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| Photo courtesy Chiemsee2016 via Pixabay |
“Modern society is defined by an excess of opportunity. We
have more information, more products, and more options than ever before.
“As a result, curating, filtering, and refining are more important skills than ever before. Those who edit best will find the signal in the noise.”
—James Clear
After a year of pandemic-related slowing down, have you “edited” your life? What changes would you like to take forward into the future?
“Nothing is so personal as happiness; each soul is fitted for a joy entirely individual; often a whole life is required to discover it.”
—Jeanne de Vietinghoff, The Understanding of Good
What are some things that make you happy?
One thing that makes me happy—travel/road trips! I just returned from a quick road trip with my friend Kerri (she’s fully vaccinated and I’m halfway there), and there would have been a Field Trip Friday today except that I’ve been wrestling with my computer much of last night and today. First it hid my photos, then it ate my blog post. Twice. So stay tuned—trip adventures and photos to follow. (I took the one above on Panama City beach.)
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| Szilvia Basso on Unsplash |
“Belief in happiness is not an illusion of youth, as is often assumed, but the experience of a force that grows and triumphs over reality. The more our feeble hope is flung and broken against the deceptions of life, the more surely will it rise powerful and transformed.”
—Jeanne de Vietinghoff, The Understanding of Good
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| Photo courtesy Luiza via Pixabay |
“Time to check in with ourselves, to sit in the core of who we are and uncover what’s really going on in there. If our cells are repaired while we sleep, then our heart is renewed in the quiet of the alone. And it’s there in the stillness that we truly get to know ourselves, learning how to live with genuine curiosity and desire, rather than need and avoidance.”
—Susannah Conway, This
I Know
