The Pursuit of Happiness

Marianne asked what rules us. This is my response.

When I close my eyes and make a wish, it’s to be happy. And I quantify it: it’s not to be deliriously happy every minute of the day, or to relentlessly race after ever more highs of bliss, it’s more to recognize what keeps me satisfied, and to endeavour to stay in that place.

It’s a constant weighing up process: I live out in the sticks, and have a long commute to work every day that means I wake up before five every morning to go to my badly-paid job. I worry constantly about money. But I care passionately about my job, and derive huge satisfaction from it, and the early sleepy start to it means that I see the dawn breaking over the lake. In the summer the sun rises like a huge orange balloon that we chase through the trees until they give way to urban sprawl, and in the winter the cloudy sky is like a pale, hand-painted silk-velvet quilt rolling out before us. The people that I travel with are amongst those I love best in the world: I don’t drive, but I managed to persuade my best friends to buy houses near me, so I have lifts to work, and my social life within walking distance. Much as I think, often, it would be nice to live in the city, my heart lifts when we drive under the bridge of the neighbouring town, and through the long tunnel of trees to home, where the air is cooler and greener, and the forest is on our left and the lake on our right. And much as I’d love a garden, or at the very least, a terrace, I’d give up this apartment with such reluctance that I don’t really ever imagine moving.

It’s with people that I’m most ruthless in my protection of my own happiness. I’m bordering on psychopathically anti-social: if I don’t get enough time to myself, I start to think I’ll go insane. And I’m talking about weeks, rather than hours, of not having to see another human being. During the summer, I have to work hard to ensure my friendships are ticking over so that they survive into the autumn, but then I can put up with months of days of being surrounded by hundreds of people. At some point in my life I decided there was no point in putting up with anyone that I didn’t actively care about: if the people I know don’t enhance my life, and add to my store of happiness, I have no time for them.

I’m patient. If I can’t have what I want, I’ll do without. I’ll live through emotional deserts, gradually shutting down until I’m in survival mode, unless I have people with enough to offer that I can be persuaded to open up. I’m tolerant: no one is perfect or unflawed, and no one should have to conform to any idea of what I want, but I’m uncompromising too. If the basics of the relationship aren’t right, than it doesn’t matter how many good points anyone has. It doesn’t matter how great the sex is if the person doesn’t make me happy, and it doesn’t matter how great the person is if the sex doesn’t make me happy. And the same goes for non-sexual relationships, with the appropriate changes in parameters.

What motivates me, what drives me, is keeping my happiness levels topped up. I’m not ambitious, or interested in fame and fortune. I just want for the things that surround me every day to give me pleasure. Luxury, for me, starts when I open my eyes in the morning and see the colour of my walls. My journey to work is long, but the company is good. My job is poorly paid in terms of eking out a survival, and immeasurably rich in worth and satisfaction. The people I choose to have around me I value in any number of ways. I have no interest in being loved or liked for the sake of it: I’d rather have the love of only the people whose love makes me feel good because I deserve it.

But none of this counts if I can’t be happy with myself, or respect and value the person that I am. Everything else is ephemeral, apart from the people, including myself. Take away my job and my home, and I would be actively unhappy, but I could find little impulses of happiness still, somewhere. Take away the people, and I’d struggle. Other people cannot define us, but they can enhance us. I choose to cultivate the relationships I have because they add to my store of happiness, drag me out of the bad times, make the good times sparkle more brightly. There’s no space in my life for anyone who can’t give me that.