%title Be Happy for No Reason
Recently I've been practicing the skill of being happy for no reason whatsoever. I wish I had learned this skill years ago. It would have saved me so much unhappiness. For some reason, I was a dunce and thought that I needed a reason to be happy. This lead to lots of pointless behaviors, like trying to do things in order to be happy. What a bother, when I can just choose to be happy whenever I want.
This whole idea that I need a reason to be happy has really started to unravel. I very rarely don't want to be happy, which seems like good enough reason to be happy to me. I used to be such an ignoramus that I would think, “I’m unhappy now, but I will be happy when I get into a top university.” What a load of hogwash. The correct thought would have been, “I’m happy right now!”
This skill isn’t even very difficult. Learning meditation can certainly help make it easier to pick up, but it’s not even required. I’ll describe the way I developed this skill, and hopefully you can learn it too. I’m having a lot of trouble thinking of a skill that is more useful than this. Most skills I learned were with the eventual goal of becoming happy, but this cuts right to the core of the issue.
A few days ago, I was happy for several very good reasons. Persephone had arrived, and as she is wont to do she made the weather a perfect balance between cool and warm with the sun and breeze playing off each other so delightfully. I was sitting in the fountain at Washington Square Park, listening to an amazingly talented drummer, Steven, channeling the muses through his incredibly simple drum kit. Accompanying him were his two gifted friends, who were dancing to his playing and helping him collect donations from the crowd arrayed around the fountain. A bunch of little kids joined in the dancing and one of the dancers, Bobby, invited the audience to come up to dance. I figured if a little kid can do it, I should be able to, so I joined in. It was a blast to let loose in front of the forty some spectators, without a care in the world. Afterwards, I made friends with Steven, Bobby, and Kristin.
Now, the important part of this story for developing the skill of being happy for no reason whatsoever is that I was fully present in the moment above. This meant that I was able to really feel happiness, and really notice all the details of the moment that accompanied that feeling. This is important, because the brain is basically a big association machine. When I want to feel happy again, I just have to bring up the associations I’ve made with happiness. I just have to conjure up the crowd in the fountain, the bright noon sun against my skin, the scent of cherry blossoms, the ecstatic beat of the drums, and imagine myself fully situated in that memory. Then, as if by magic, I feel happy.
Next time you feel really happy, pause for a moment and notice everything about that moment. Everything that you notice is a trigger that you can use later to bring that feeling back. The best part of this skill is that the more you practice, the better you get. I didn’t think it was possible, but I’m actually getting increasingly happy whenever I want to be. I hope you find this skill as liberating as I do. Everything I do is more enjoyable when I do it happily… and there’s a lot I don’t feel like I have to do, now that I’m happy.