Lifescape

In this post: reflections on happiness, but first, news of the launch of the new creative thorp website where you can browse and buy stunning art and poetry gifts. If you’ve been to the website before, then you’ll find it cleaner, quicker and easier to use. I hope you’ll enjoy browsing and consider subscribing to creative thorp via. the new subscription page.

A GROWN UP KIND OF HAPPINESS?

“Happiness”, writes Matthieu Ricard, “is the result of inner maturity. It depends on us alone and requires patient work carried out from day to day” (ref).

It has struck me lately how true this is for many of us; that achieving happiness is a grown-up, lifelong process rather than a permanent state; a way through to something intrinsic in us, rather than just a positive response to favourable or unfavourable circumstances.

Of course childhood is – for the fortunate child – a glorious place to be, and it is her very immaturity that leads to happiness: the ways in which she follows her needs and desires so closely, and finds delight in the simplest, stupidest things. Happiness, for the child, can be there because there is no requirement (for the fortunate child) for her to be anything else but immature. But then when immaturity lingers, it confuses the adolescent and begins to make looming adulthood seem a journey into the unknown.

Maybe it is not surprising that many of us find it difficult to grow up and and perhaps we cannot be wholly blamed for our holding on to our lingering immaturities. Growing up is confusing and there are few rituals of initiation remaining that help us pass from one stage of our lives to another. We are urged, on the one hand, to listen to our ‘inner child’, and on the other to take our responsibilities seriously. And the carrot of quick-fix success and happiness is dangled before us, as numerous 20 and 30-something celebrities bring out their autobiographies, as if they have access to a secret that the rest of us have somehow missed.

There is no quick fix, and no secret. Some wisdom only comes with experience, part of which tells us that being happy throughout a life is never guaranteed – for there are far too many variables! This wisdom says that all we can hope for is to negotiate our path with a growing degree of maturity, openness and presence. When I bring these qualities to my own life, I notice that there are moments of joy waiting for me everywhere and anywhere, and at other times it is the lingering presence of my immature, needy, childish self that gets in the way of my experiencing them.

We might, therefore, regard the inner-child, with all his clinging to need and impulse, as being an obstacle to the kind of deep, sustainable happiness that we all desire. I know of myself that it is when I am inwardly immature that I find it difficult to touch joy. Somehow, at these times, a sullen blanket of bruised entitlement and “it’s not fair” covers my world and conceals its potential. And I also sometimes feel put in my place (as a child might) and the familiar, habitual insecurities move me away from happiness and towards some kind of historical need for reassurance.

By all means let us hold onto our playfulness, spontaneity and attachments – but let us also not mistake childish buffoonery or the safety of habit for happiness. We all know the archetype of the clown with the painted smile, and our TV screens are filled daily with outwardly happy people who, behind the scenes, are desperately trying to fill themselves up with the transient pseudo-happiness of sex, consumption and whatever is their drug of choice. At the same time, others succumb to their attachments and find a place to belong (or hide), which, however values-based (whether conventional or rebellious) at the outset, becomes fixed in ways that prevent them from growing and changing as they have the potential to do.

Happiness -  joy – is a contradictory thing anyway. Some of the psychotherapy clients I see who are often profoundly unhappy also carry an enormous capacity for joy and creativity. They seem somehow OPEN to the world in a way that others are not, and while this leads as much to pain and sorrow as it does to joy – they sometimes have the magical capacity to reveal the beauty in the world to others in surprising and joyful ways.

It requires strength, honesty, courage and a sense of great resilience and maturity to live with this contradiction. Nevertheless, I have a sneaking suspicion that, in the long run, many of these people – undoubtedly deeply depressed  for much of their time on earth – often live lives that are profound and fulfilled. They ask big questions and are somehow not as afraid of despair as the rest of us; for them, after all, it is a familiar, if unwelcome, companion.

Perhaps these were the serious children – the boys and girls whose inner-maturity was there from the start. Emotionally and spiritually precocious they were always tuned into the pain of the world – perhaps too much so for their own wellbeing. It is perhaps their inner children who can teach us something important about growing up with joy. We should, I think, honour them, as the soul-guides of our age, who, if we listen carefully, can teach us not just lessons of happiness, but how to live.