Thousands of books have been written that could be grouped under the title The Pursuit of Happyness. But the elixir of happiness is not found after reading them. Or maybe it’s the approach itself? Is it possible in principle to create a universal recipe for happiness?
It is said: «Man is created for happiness, like a bird for flight.» But the work of a guy, chirping, fluttering is such that a bird needs twice its weight in food per day. For comparison: the elephant needs only 15-20%. No wonder the poet Larisa Miller, with her amazing ability to be happy, wrote: “Do not see your highest flight, because your eyes are clouded from flowing sweat.” And the phrase of V.G. Korolenko acquires a thought-provoking meaning.
“The seeker of happiness,” Evelyn Waugh* remarked, “is like a drunkard who cannot find his home in any way, although he knows that he has a home.” Or, as Andrey Makarevich wrote: “The blue bird has not become smaller, it’s just that in the light of recent days, too many men and women began to foolishly chase after it.”
Indeed, what are we running after and what are we looking for? What do I understand by happiness, where and how do I know that I don’t have it now? Am I running past happiness in an endless pursuit of it, reminiscent of the story of a little boy who jumped in an attempt to get a candy from a buffet and said in response to his mother who offered to think: “There is no time to think — you have to jump”? Am I being held hostage by my ideas of happiness? Who ever said that I should and can be happy all the time I am awake and have exceptionally happy dreams? Or is the hero of the old film “Once upon a time an old man and an old woman” right, who noticed that only a pig is happy 24 hours a day: it lies in a warm puddle, and they warm it with blue light? Or are the echoing I.S. Turgenev: “Do you want to be happy? Learn to suffer first” – and V.B. Shklovsky: «It’s good to live and feel the way of life with your muzzle»?
Sometimes I think that too many conditions for happiness block the very experience of happiness with such a fertile shadow. It becomes habitual, fades to the feeling of «usually, normally.» “Now I have an office — it doesn’t get better, and I have never been so happy with work as when I wrote my doctoral dissertation on the windowsill in the corridor of a communal apartment,” a colleague told me. And happiness echoed in me from sitting over the candidate’s room in the communal kitchen that was empty for the night. I think: why was it there and then, where and when, it would seem, there was nothing for it? And I find one answer: I didn’t expect anything from anywhere and from anyone under hypnosis that I was created for happiness, and what I finally received in the form of a free kitchen was no less than my expectations, and sometimes even more.
It seems to me that we are fixated on the deceptively attractive idea that life should be tailored to our happiness. “God, how much longer can I endure?!” the man yelled in despair. And an angel looked out from behind the cloud: “God forbid you endure as much as you can.” Life doesn’t owe me anything, and since God brought Adam and Eve out of Eden, it’s just the way it is and nothing else. And happiness is not only something positive — it can be painful, difficult, painful, bitter. One by one, the father, younger brother, mother passed away. Overwhelmed by grief. However, happiness comes from the fact that he could not only be next to them at this difficult time for them, but also together — so together, so close, as it was hardly ever before.
While I am looking for happiness, it is looking for me on the same roads. Why can’t I find it? Why don’t I recognize him when we meet or push him away, they say, move away, don’t interfere, you see — I’m looking for happiness ?! How does it work? How is it possible to share the work and happiness of the flight? But it turns out — for me, for him, for her, for you, for us … It seems tempting to write a recipe for happiness that helps everyone so that the reader responds: “Now everything is clear to me.” But «everything is clear» would mean that I spoke badly or was poorly understood. The potions of happiness include various commandments and advice. We collect these herbs, shake, dry and mix ourselves — not for everyone, but for ourselves, we insist on their relationship with ourselves and life. They must be shaken before use. Or we don’t insist. But then there is nothing to shake. Then jump, jump, jump…
* Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966), English satirist