Happy. Happy. Happy. Happy. Say it 20 times and the word, like all words, starts to lose its meaning and all you hear is the sound: Hap-pee. Hap-pee.
If there is one truism in life, it’s that people want to be happy. Doesn’t matter where you live, or where you’re from, or what your station in life is, or what color your skin is, or how much money you have or don’t have, if you’re a homo sapien, you want to be happy. You strive for happiness. Animals probably have this drive too, but their happiness needs are more basic. Angus used to be happy with a Nylabone in his mouth, gnawing on it for hours. But try to take it away from him — which his prior owner stupidly did, leading directly to Angus’ surrender and adoption by me and EX — and, well, you were going to end up with a couple of bloody fingers. If you were lucky. Angus was possessive with his Happy. Who could blame him, really? We’re all kind of like that. We’re all chasing our own personal Nylabones, aren’t we? And if we’re lucky enough to find one, don’t we want to chew on that fucker for as long as possible? And don’t we bite when someone tries to take our Nylabones away from us?
Not literally. But we do bite in our own way. We “bite” through anger, tears, depression, sadness, hitting the Tito’s and Canada Dry, zoning out on video games, throwing ourselves into our work, going on promiscuous benders. Happiness is so goddamned elusive and temporary in life, we latch on to it when we have it, fight like hell to keep it, and lash out when it leaves. And then we hunt for it again. Life is hard. We all want to be Happy.
Which begs the question: What is Happy? What is Happiness? Can it even be defined? It’s so subjective to each person. Something that makes one person happy, another person may not care about at all. Also, to further clarify this, I’m not talking about basic human needs here: food, shelter, and clothing. Happiness is a First World issue, right? Who can think about self-actualization when they’re starving, fleeing gangs, or trying to find a roof to put over their head? Then again, all those migrants from Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Mexico who are trying to get into the United States by any means possible, they’re searching for happiness too, aren’t they? How happy can you be when your children are threatened by gang violence, rape, kidnapping, indentured servitude, or murder? Maybe it’s survival they’re searching for. Maybe it’s as simple as that. I have represented people that desperate. The horrors my clients suffered and described to me are nothing the average American can comprehend, and it’s too much to go into here.
If we agree that “How can I achieve Happiness” is a largely a First World question that assumes a person has all of their other basic shit covered, what do we do with the fact that varying states of happiness, however elusive, are found everywhere, in places rich and poor, large and small, for better or for worse. I’m always surprised when I see a smiling kid’s face with a disgusting slum in the background. In 1989, I had the opportunity to visit my first slum and experience this first-hand. It was in Cuernevaca, Mexico. Our group, organized through my college, visited a bunch of poor families who were living in tin shanties near a railroad track located at the bottom of a huge hill with decent-sized houses on top. It was hot as fuck — downright stifling — and there was a small, polluted river to the right of the trail we hiked on to get to the shantytown. To say it stank to high heaven is an absurd understatement. I seriously have never smelled anything so bad. 30 years later, I can still smell it in my mind. It was raw, untreated sewage, like shambling by an enormous open toilet full of shit, piss, rotten food, and festering garbage that you can’t flush. Our guide explained that the houses high up on the hill overlooking the shit river had working toilets and showers that emptied into the shit river through sewer pipes in a concrete wall. It stunk all the time. No days off. Fortunately for the poor people living there, it didn’t rain too often. If it ever did, they’d be swamped by raw sewage and god knows what types of diseases. I still remember my utter disbelief that human beings actually lived that close to such a polluted mess, with all of the disease it promised.
As for the people’s shanty “houses” themselves, they were basically these small wooden huts with corrugated tin roofs. You could see through the cracks in the walls and where the walls met the roof. We’re weren’t talking Toll Brothers construction here, obviously. The houses were made from whatever materials the inhabitants could find, which they slapped together the best way they could. A few houses had concrete bricks at the base. They were the lucky ones. We sat in a few of the houses to talk to the owners, who told us about their lives what it was like to live in such extreme poverty. To hear these men and women speak, while having all of my senses — sight, smell, touch, taste, hearing — bombarded with the brutal reality of that kind of existence changed my life, literally on the spot. It changed my worldview and the way I looked at people from other countries. I had visited Europe before, many times. And the year before, I visited rural Appalachia, on the border between Kentucky and Tennessee, a part of the United States no one ever talks about, full of sad, desolate towns and real poverty. But before visiting Cuernavaca, I had never experienced Third World poverty, the kind of poverty that punches you in the face and makes you wonder how the hell people can live like this, day in, day out, the kind that offers no hope for anyone.
As we were sitting in one of the shanty houses and listening to the owner speak, one of my friends, an athletic guy in way better shape than me, started turning a pale, yellowish white. All of a sudden, he escaped out the door. My recollection, which is admittedly hazy after all this time, is that he puked in the dirt yard outside. It’s possible he gathered himself and didn’t toss his sofritos, I can’t remember for sure. But a lot of us were feeling as nauseous as him, that’s for damn sure. That much I remember. The smell was that bad, even in the house. I was already trending left politically before this, after spending my misguided, politically embryonic high school years as a Carter-hating Reagan lover, but this experience, and my prior one in Appalachia, totally altered my values, priorities, and politics forever.
And still…. STILL… in this awful shanty shithole, because it WAS literally a shithole, the kind of shithole that all these racist wall-loving MAGAts look down on but would be dying to escape (probably packing heat in the process) if they happened to be born THERE instead of HERE, in the United States, I actually saw smiles. When we took out our cameras, a bunch of young, dirty faced kids came up to us, pushed themselves together and posed for pictures.
Here they are, in a picture I scanned to a CD many years ago:
How could these little boys be smiling, living in that squalor? In the 30 years since this picture was taken, I’ve often wondered what happened to these boys. What lives did they lead? Are they even still alive? I also wondered : Were they really happy when this picture was taken, or were they just temporarily excited to be the focus of a bunch of gringo tourists, the stars of their own show?
Who knows? What I do know is that faces like this, experiences like this, traveling the world as I have done since the age of 2 with my parents, changed me from viewing myself as simply an American citizen, someone better, smarter, and more powerful than the citizens of other countries, to viewing myself as the product of simple good fortune. Good fortune that I happen to have been born into the richest and most powerful country on the planet at its zenith in history. I didn’t deserve it. I didn’t do anything special. It just happened and here I am. So I’m not better than these kids, or the kids we’re locking up in cages right now. Or their parents. I’m just WAY, FUCKING, LUCKIER THAN THEY ARE.
The world is pretty big fucking place, and the United States of America is not at the center of it. No country is.
Getting back to this notion of happiness though, something I’ll be returning to over and over, I’m sure, what is it about these faces, these smiles, that has stuck with me all of these years? I think it’s that they were able to find a moment of joy, possibly many moments of joy, while living in the kind of abject squalor that made us want to retch after sitting there for 10 minutes. In a way, it’s embarrassing.
Now that I’m past the half-way point of my life and have experienced the deaths of two of my best childhood friends, the loss of my father to dementia at the age of 75, the adoption of my daughter, and more recently, the mental and emotional trauma of a separation and divorce, I think I am finally starting to reach some trustworthy conclusions about what happiness is and how to be happy. At least, to me. And for me, it comes down to the use of the most precious and limited commodity we all have in our short lives: time.
Lots of things make me happy, but I know what makes me happiEST. It’s making memories — experiencing and then mentally recording memories with the people I love and care about: my friends, my family, and yes, myself. Using my limited time for those things makes me the happiest. There’s nothing more powerful and emotionally meaningful to me than seeing an old friend I haven’t seen in years and reminiscing about the past and catching up on the present. There’s nothing I love more than reuniting with my sisters, or my mother, or my cousins and family in Italy after I haven’t seen them in five years, retracing those old roads in Domodossola at the foot of the Italian Alps that I walked at the ages of 6, 11, 15, 22, 30, 34, 38, and 43, at different stages of my life, different stages of my evolution as a man. There’s nothing that makes me happier than landing in a place I have never been before for the first time: Argentina. Japan. Scotland. Poland. Northern Ireland. Iceland. It’s exhilarating. If I had limitless resources, I have no doubt what I’d be doing.
But I don’t have limitless resources, and I won’t until that gotdamn MegaMillions hits. So the other part of happiness is CHOOSING to be happy wherever you are and whatever you’re doing, while parenting a child, holding down a job, and finding or maintaining a relationship. Life can weigh you down. We can’t just wait for our next trip or reunion to smile and dance, right? We need to find a way to do it every day. To choose it as a state of mind. The old being present, being mindful, and being grateful thing.
THAT part, the every day happiness part, I have not yet figured out. That part is a work in progress.
