After waking this morning very suddenly from a vivid dream (in which the car I was driving at a ridiculous speed hit a bump and took off high into the air, so that I knew with absolute, screaming certainty that I was about to die, and wondered what I should do in the few seconds I had left before I hit the ground) I was relieved to find that, not only was I alive and safe (and screaming) in bed, but it was Simon’s turn to get up early – which he already had done. Which also meant it was a chance for me to read a book at a time of day when I wouldn’t fall asleep after only two sentences. Plane journeys, and my alternate ‘mornings off’ are really the only times these days when I can do this (which makes me wonder why Simon and I insist on buying each other piles of books as birthday and Christmas presents).
The book that I am oh-so-slowly progressing through at the moment is called The Philosopher and The Wolf – Lessons from the Wild on Love, Death and Happiness (Mark Rowlands). Actually, this book wasn’t a present. It was a bored-with-waiting-in-the-airport-departure-lounge purchase, which I bought because I’m always bored and I’m always interested in Lessons on Happiness. And it turns out that the reason for this perpetual state of my mind is that I am – along with pretty much all the rest of the human race – a “Happiness Junkie”.
To paraphrase Mr Rowlands on his take on the pursuit of happiness…..
We humans think of happiness as a feeling: specifically, the feeling of pleasure. Therefore, the quality of our life, whether it is going well or badly, is a matter of what feelings we have. The perpetual (and futile) pursuit of feelings is what distinguishes us from other animals. We don’t just have feelings, or produce them – we examine them. And when we examine them, we often find that we don’t feel the way we want to, or the way we think we should. Which is when we go in search of the ‘next fix’. For the junkie, happiness always comes with the new and the exotic rather than the old and familiar.
The book goes on to say all sorts of interesting things about happiness, including the fact that happiness is not the same as pleasure, and is not just about pleasant feelings. He analyses the situations in which he has felt most happy (in amateur boxing fights), and in which his wolf, Brenin, seems to be most happy (chasing rabbits), and concludes that happiness is itself partly unpleasant. The pleasant and unpleasant aspects form a dissoluble whole.
I have been feeling rather guilty lately because I haven’t been feeling as ‘happy’ as I thought I ought to be feeling, given that all my dreams and wishes have come true. Here we are, not one full year into our second brand new life of the last two years, and I am already bored.
I am bored with the routine of doing the same chores every day. I am bored with the fact that when I wake up in the morning I know exactly what my day will consist of. I am bored with picking up animal poo, and trudging through mud, and never being able to relax and get immersed in something of my choice during the day, because there is always some animal thing or other to be done. The llamas need more hay, the pigs need more water, the dogs need another walk, the chicken house needs cleaning out….. and then suddenly it is night time, and a couple of hours of TV or interneting before we go to bed and it all starts again the next day. I often feel the same as I used to feel when I had a full time job – only maybe without the same level of stress. And because I know so many of you out there will be reading this from the position of being stuck in full-time stressful jobs, and wishing that you could be lucky enough to chuck it all in and chase your dreams like I have, I feel really bad. I have everything I want, and I’m still moaning! How spoilt can a girl be?
For wolves, happiness is the pursuit of rabbits. For people, happiness is the pursuit of achievable goals. The key to happiness lies in the word ‘pursuit’. It is the process of trying to attain the pleasure, rather than the mere pleasure itself that makes us happy. I think perhaps I long for the new and different, not so much because I am a happiness junkie, always believing that I need just one more thing to make me happy, but because it is the pursuit itself that makes me happy. For me, the opposite of happiness is not unhappiness or misery: it is ennui.
And probably the time has come for me to do my pursuing in a way that doesn’t require yet another massive upheaval, or change of life, (I think I just heard a sigh of relief from the other side of the room). I love to have a dream, probably more than I love to have a dream come true. But maybe the dream could, just this once, be found a little closer to home. I need to stop chasing feelings. But I need to chase something. I don’t know just yet what it will be, but I do know that I will probably be at my happiest if I never quite catch it.
