A Warm Gnu

I recently read the novel Villette by Charlotte Bronte (the author of Jane Eyre), and before my academic analysis (which is far from complete), I engaged the character Lucy Snowe on a much more personal level. At least twice in the novel she stops to say "you can think I was happy, if it makes you feel better" implying that she was, in fact, miserable. Why was she miserable? The first time, she seems to be saying that it's because of a difficult family and a drop in financial status. The second time, she very oddly skirts the admission that her only real lover died in a storm at sea. Apparently the novel covers in detail only the times when her happiness is brief or uncertain, and glosses over misery, which is most of her life. She claims to have real happiness for three whole years, while she is confident that she is loved but her lover is absent.


Lucy, in the novel, claims that "Happiness is not a potato." What she means is that some people are blessed with bliss, and others are not, and that there's no way of predicting or attracting it - no way of "cultivating" it like a plant. We are at the mercy of our circumstances, and those blessed with happiness should understand their privilege.

On the opposite side of this claim stands current psychochemistry. This article lays out the secret to cultivating happiness like a potato. Yoga. Eating veg. Having sex. It's the Legally Blonde solution. (seriously - happiness and guns have some kind of bizarre mental association, and I'm really hoping it's not Freudian).

The United States Declaration of Independence claims that humans have a right to pursue happiness, but common usage has decided that in such a form, that simply means their capitalistic right to pursue personal property. (Not the right to have it, though, which would be the opposite. Basically, we have the right to want something we may never achieve. The right to pursue happiness is, in a way, the right to perpetual misery.)

Scripture (Alma 41) offers this rather unhelpful tidbit: "Wickedness never was happiness" (verse 10). If you read the verse in context, a father is teaching his son that our eternal mood will come from what we sought in life: if we want to be happy in the afterlife we seek happiness through obedience in this life. Unfortunately, nowhere in those verses does it claim that obedience in this life will bring immediate happiness. Obedience is not pleasure.

The idea that we are to learn what kind of eternity we want, and how to get it, makes more sense to me than that this life is simply a misery to be endured in obedience until we reach the other side where sits our reward. It's not an incorrect way of looking at life, possibly, but it doesn't explain why so much of life is designed to bring us joy: friendships, nature, family, food, etc.

Some circumstances really do make us unhappy, and it's folly to pretend otherwise. Bereavement, abandonment, cruelty, destitution, failure, illness, weakness, and brain chemistry are a few. And some things make us happier, for however long: various kinds of pleasures and indulgences, exercise, romance, health, beauty, achievement, validation, kindness, recognition, security. 

I don't think that means that the secret of lifelong happiness means surrounding yourself with the latter and avoiding the former, because they're largely out of our control. I also don't think the secret is to manipulate your own brain chemistry, although an awareness of it certainly doesn't hurt.

This is my opinion: I think the secret to lifelong happiness is totally individual, and that it's part of our work to decide what kinds of eternal existence suit us.

So push all the buttons. Figure it out. God has some suggestions, too.

When misery strikes (and it probably will, especially if you've chosen a difficult path). . . ? 

Do you learn to enjoy misery? Do you milk it for your art? Do you keep your back straight and chin up? Do you wait it out with patience? Do you bend so that you will not break? Do you look for a light at the end of the tunnel? Do you smell the roses? Do you feel sorry for yourself (we need sympathy, and sometimes we're the only ones giving it. Stop the judgy!), or eat your favorite food, or nap? Do you seek help, or be Batman? Do you release your anger immediately or bleed it away? Do you care for and comfort yourself, or bury your worries in backbreaking work? Do you make peace, or fight? Do you love? Or do you just go with it, because strategy is more than you can handle right now?

If you want to be happy (when you have the luxury of choice), what does that happiness taste like? Because there's at least 31 flavors, and not everybody loves Rocky Road. And don't let the world tell you that you have to like Rocky Road. Because you don't have to. And maybe you can't.

The ways we train ourselves to be and think and feel now, we will be for a very long time. And if we're looking for Heaven to be a place where we cannot but be happy, remember that God weeps for us.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

High and Low Horses

 I have not blogged in a LONG TIME and I'm so rusty.  Politics these days, amirite? My little brother pissed me off a few weeks ago in the throes of a political kerfuffle (not reasoned enough to be an argument by either definition). He accused me of posing - I don't remember exactly what he called it, but it was something like "virtue signaling." And very, very rapidly, I was trapped. I could not even attempt to do the right thing without knowing that I was doing exactly what he had just sneered at. I suppose I could go back and carefully analyze the rhetoric of the conversation and delicately unravel exactly what was happening. I am capable of that kind of analysis, but this is a blog, not a school paper, and I'm more interested in the abstractions at play. I'm always more interested in the abstractions. Let's imagine that you have a stick figure in a two-dimensional world. I'd draw it and upload it for you, but somebody stole my reMarkable. Stick fig...
Read more

The Species of my Faith Tree

Image
 Last week I wrote about the space that faith fills in the epistemology of the gospel: specifically that it extends beyond the known, but can be felt and experienced as a sensation as if something is growing inside us. I reiterated and complicated Alma's description of how to tell when a seed is good, and when we should keep watering it. As a metaphor, planting "the word" as a seed is extremely helpful for those who are new to the idea of faith, and those of us who have begun taking it for granted. And yet I find that there is more to say. What exactly is this thing whose tentacles/branches/nerve cells want to invade every part of me? Must I let it grow before I know? What is the nature of the growth? Is it a cancer? A parasite? A symbiote? How much of it is me, and how much of it is not me? Will I birth it like a child, or absorb it into my cells like a protein nutrient? Maybe. . . Maybe a better metaphor is gut biome - it's a thing that biologists haven't quite ...
Read more

The Love-Doctrine Tightrope

Image
 LDS news is abuzz with Elder Holland's address to BYU faculty last week. His comments about gay students was particularly concerning, especially when he lamented how few people were willing to wield a "musket" in defense of eternal marriage doctrine (which doctrine is exclusively heterosexual when it is not a polygynous variation thereof). Perhaps a blunderbuss might have been a more apt weapon. War imagery has always been problematic in religious discussion specifically because humans are the WORST at correctly identifying an enemy. We can't do it. A religious person wielding any kind of projectile weaponry is guaranteed to injure someone they should be protecting. If I may generalize dangerously for a moment, I think that our problem is that in defense of "doctrine" we end up fighting people, and people are never the enemy, no matter what ideas they espouse, and no matter how militant we feel they are.  Some "people are enemies" confusion even c...
Read more