The resolution of happiness

As the new year kicks into full swing, the possible resolutions I can set before myself are limitless – go to the gym more often, eat better, keep my desk, my house, my car clean. But the one that I am most interested in actually attaining and maintaining is happiness.

I’m currently rereading Eat Pray Love by Elizabeth Gilbert, who spent a year divided evenly between Italy, India and Indonesia focusing on pleasure, devotion and balance.

In her Indonesia section, where she’s focused on finding the balance between worldly enjoyment and divine transcendence, she writes:

“I keep remembering one of my Guru's teachings about happiness. She says that people universally tend to think that happiness is a stroke of luck, something that will maybe descend upon you like fine weather if you're fortunate enough. But that's not how happiness works. Happiness is the consequence of personal effort. You fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it and sometimes even travel around the world looking for it. You have to participate relentlessly in the manifestations of your own blessings. And once you have achieved a state of happiness, you must never become lax about maintaining it, you must make a mighty effort to keep swimming upward into that happiness forever, to stay afloat on top of it. If you don’t, you will leak away innate contentment. It’s easy to pray when you’re in distress but continuing to pray when your crisis has passed is like a sealing process, helping your soul hold tight to its good attainment.”

Proactive is not a word I’ve ever been able to use to describe my own quest for happiness. For most of my adult life, I’ve given up ownership of my own happiness to the responses, reactions, feedback of a partner, a friend, a boss, a parent, a sibling. “I just want to be happy” is often a phrase I’ve uttered to myself and anyone else who happened to be standing too close at the time.

Not that I haven’t had any happiness in my life. If I concentrate hard enough, I can see moments, in the past as well as the present, where I’ve lived in moments of happiness – roasting marshmallows over a campfire on a starry June evening, watching my niece smile at my sister like she’s the sun and the moon, gallery hopping in Taos, beating my parents at a friendly game of euchre, ruining another pair of shoes creeking at camp, a new business win, a quiet afternoon window shopping in San Francisco, feeling the wind blowing as we stand on deck watching a humpback whale crash into the ocean, watching the New Mexico late evening sky light up as the setting sun and impending thunderstorm battle for exposure, hanging out and laughing hysterically at Mystery Science Theater 3000, squealing with pure pleasure as my grandpa pushes me higher in the tire swing, a quiet evening spent in the arms of someone I adore.

These moments though have been only that though, just moments – happy moments that each stand alone with no direct connection to one another. The string that should connect them all absent.

So my resolution this year is to take ownership and responsibility for my own happiness. I’m determined to fight for it, insist upon it. I’m no longer satisfied to just exist between happy moments. I want the in between to matter too, I want to find happiness in the in between. And so this is my resolution.