There are few things more wonderful to see than the utter glee AJ expresses every day. The giggling, grinning, laughing, complete happiness is marvelous. The pure, unbridled joy of a small child is often held up as one of the best things in life. Of course we ignore the mindless, seemingly random, sudden bursts of incomprehensible violence that babies indulge in, probably because it manifests itself in small, harmless slaps and a furious but equally harmless shaking of small, light objects. If AJ were shoving a glass in mum's face or kicking dad to a pulp while he was prone on the floor then it would not be quite so cute.
Most mammals are like that. Lion cubs and baby chimps play and play fight, lambs gambol and dogs roll around yelping for no apparent reason. Older, more worldly wise parents are more reserved and considered. They loll around and posture a bit and feed and shit and sleep and make small animals. And that is about it. I'm not sure many, if any, animals other than man have a concept of happiness. And I am almost certain that only man has happiness as a gola. There is a well trod developmental path that animals follow. We have trained some of the more malleable animals to display signs of what we call happiness when we bribe or trick them; my dogs will damn near wag their arses off when they think I will throw a ball or give them some food. It's great, but it is more simple than happy.
Animals, in general, display the appropriate behavior and attitude for their given situation. Do animals have attitudes? Don't know; but you get my drift. Animals, that is, apart from us humans. Blessed with a higher consciousness than our mammal relatives we have come up with the ideal of happiness to which we must, MUST aspire.
Only, when you think about it (OK, when I think about it) it is just a bit bullshit. Thanks to 'Hungry Beast' for that wonderful turn of phrase. I'm not sure I can properly define pure happiness, so I'll skip past that tricky bit and move on to happiness in the world in which I live. We live. I'm not a happy person. I have my moments, of course, and I am by no means an unhappy person. But I'm not a happy person. And that is perfectly fine with me. I don't think there is anything wrong with, most of the time, just being. I don't think there is anything wrong with being pissed off when things piss me off and if I think things are shit and say so then I'm saying so because I think so. Still following me? Good.
I am blessed with a thick skin and arrogance that help me muddle through life with relative ease. So if I'm accused of being miserable or told to cheer up I take the accusation and advice and ignore it, carrying on regardless. I'm comfortable with the way I am. But many people are not. A great many people. In fact, I think, most. And a lot of that is because they are not as happy as they should be. Dur... How happy should you be? As luck would have it TV and radio and magazines and newspapers and credit card companies and billboards and many, many other fine people are able to show us how happy we should be. Not only that, they show us how we can be as happy as we should be! Huzzah!
There are a couple of paths to happiness. The one I alluded to is the path most people take. To be happy your teeth need to be this white, you need to drive this car, go on this holiday, drink this drink, watch this program, wear that fragrance. Buy your way to happiness. Only that won't work. You will always come up short. You will never be a celebrity or a rockstar; face it, you won't. You'll always want to shed another kilo, always want straigher or curlier hair, always want a bigger house or a faster car.
As even more luck would have it, once you realise how unhappy you are you can get help from all manner of therapists and shrinks and drug companies who absolutely thrive on helping you deal with your unhappiness. If you're ever so lucky you'll find yourself depressed, which of course is an illness and once there is an illness there is a drug to help. Isn't the world we've created just wonderful?
The other path to enlightened happiness is simply the opposite of the one above. Accept the way you are, accept the way other people are, accept the way the world is, take a chill pill, kick back and be happy.
Of course both miss the point. Happiness itself is not a worthy goal. It is too easily corrupted by the media and big business and small business. It is too easily commoditised and packaged and sold to the aspirational masses. You want to be happy, you need to be happy, the must be happy, happiness is all, and if you are/have this then you'll be happy! Or it is simply not defined at all, left to float about in an unachievable twilight of mung beans and incense.
Happiness, whatever it genuinely might be, is an outcome. If I steal your car you're allowed to be unhappy. If you break a leg, set the video for the wrong channel and burn your toast then you can be unhappy. You are allowed to despair at the damage done to the environment by rampant development. Just as you are allowed to feel joy at the warmth of the sun on your face, floating in the ocean, running a marathon, eating a carrot or finding a potato shaped like a cock.
Just be, and stop chasing happiness for the sake of happiness. It works for the animals so it should work for us.
The dogs
As I cycled home I pondered some more. Dogs are basically scavenging pack animals that we domesticated because they are simple creatures and malleable. Even the happiness of dogs is limited by their attention span or stupidity. I have to work Rowlf pretty hard to maintain his tail-wagging happiness and even he, after a while (albeit quite a while) will eventually stop playing and mooch off to lick his bollock sack. Rumpole, on the other hand, is plain dumb - pretty, but dumb. Even he, once he tires of head scratching will mooch off somewhere. Play and food get them going for a while, but they do not aspire to eternal and escalating happiness. And as they get older they become less playful and, in human terms, less happy. Luckily I realise they are dogs.
We humans are really not so different, up to a point. And then we go well beyond that point. We throw sticks for ourselves in the form of iPods and V8s and teeth whitener and diets and boot camps. But we never tire. In fact we convince ourselves that the moments of happiness must last forever, that we must be happy happy happy. Well, not all of us. I'll chase the odd stick, but I'm content to sit back and lick my metaphorical nut sack and entertain the thought that maybe I am a little smarter than my dogs.
Or something.
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