What Makes Us Happy?

by Tony Barbagallo

Delivered at Northwest Unitarian Universalist Congregation

on September 28, 2014

Happiness is:

Two kinds of ice-cream,

Finding a skate key,

Catching a fire-fly

Setting it free…

Happiness is playing the drum in your own school band,

And happiness is walking hand in hand.

I still remember those words I learned for an elementary school assembly more than 40 years ago. They are from the Broadway musical, “You’re a Good Man Charlie Brown.” And, you know, you can learn a lot about life from The Peanuts, Charles Shultz’s comic strip characters. Like, for instance, most of the things that happiness is, don’t have much to do with money.

I consider myself a happy person overall. I think that I’ve been very fortunate in my life, but I also believe that being happy is an attitude. It is a conscious decision.  Several years ago, when I was invited to a high school graduation, I took the graduate out for coffee and some talk. I gave him some advice: “Be happy. Choose to be happy. People like happy people for friends. When a friend is down, they try to cheer them up. When someone is always down, it gets tiresome. Choose to be happy. It will make you a happier person.”

I think sometimes that I am not a good person to give this advice; I mean I have been pretty fortunate in life and have a lot of the accoutrements of success, so why shouldn’t I be happy? Of course, that’s why we have this topic, because so many of us that have so much still find ourselves unhappy.

And too, I look around at people living in far less advantaged situations than I – some of whom I have met on my travels – and see many of them are truly happy. I remember being in New Orleans with our youth group after Katrina and meeting a couple of local guys who were working, painting. We had lunch with them and they told stories.

We learned that they were from the depressed lower Ninth Ward, that they had lived through the devastation and were getting by with the help of the community shelter and working to rebuild. But we could tell they were not unhappy people. Their stories were generally funny, of good times. They were happy guys in unhappy circumstances.  There’s a difference.

Years ago I created a rhetorical device to help confront difficult circumstances. When I am in a situation threatening to make me really unhappy I go through a checklist. Is this thing going to kill me? Is it going to kill someone near and dear to me? Is it going to seriously injure me or impair my long term health; or that of someone near and dear to me? Is it going to put my family and me into the street, with nowhere to turn? Once I get past the first few questions answering no, the problem starts to get into perspective. Things aren’t so dire.

And seeing those guys in New Orleans and the smiling faces of people in places like the slums of Lagos, Nigeria, made me realize that even answering some of those first few questions with a yes can be faced and still be happy.

How?

I remember hearing some old person – I don’t remember who and it was a long time ago and it was translated in passing, so maybe they were some Italian relatives – say something like:  the bitter times in life make the sweet juice of gladness all the sweeter.

I used to listen to a radio broadcast of talks by the philosopher Alan Watts. He was a British born philosopher best known as an interpreter and popularizer of Eastern philosophy for Western audiences. In one of those talks he spoke about how we need to experience all of life in order to appreciate any of it. It was, to my recollection, a discourse on yin and yang.

I remember hearing him say that we cannot experience “light” as a concept without darkness. In the same way, we cannot experience good without bad. If everything were good, then it would not be good, it would just be. The bad in life serves a purpose. It helps me experience – and perhaps makes sweeter – the good.

And I recognize that I cannot to any large extent control the course of the bad things that happen in life. These things just happen; and to try to impugn intentionality or malice to the universe is like a child kicking a rock he or she has tripped over. It just is.

Many of you have heard me speak of my late friend Dick: The gay, diabetic, alcoholic shrink who gave me my sailboat Ishmael as a parting gift. Dick died way too young, and suddenly, without warning, at the age of 50. Dick was perhaps my closest friend, my confidant, a mentor, a father figure and he was gone in an instant and inexplicably.  I was sad, terribly sad.

I had only recently met my wife Kristen at that point, and I don’t know what she thought of me when I turned to her and just bawled my eyes out on her shoulder, while sitting on the couch in Dick’s living room.

Would I prefer to have not have had it happen?  How could I say that? Would I have preferred not to have known and loved Dick? Would I rather not have been so close to him, to share so much and to have been so shaped in life as I was by what I learned from being around him? I should add here that it was in Dick’s kitchen that I was introduced to Alan Watts, as it was Dick who played his lectures on the radio on Sunday mornings.

No, I would never say that I would prefer for it not to have had happened; Not to have known and been close to him and even to have been devastated by his death.

Would I have wanted him to live longer and been around with me longer? Sure, yes, maybe. Who’s to say? Dick was 30 some years older than me and diabetic. He would be something like 85 today if he were alive. Perhaps he’d be facing a longer more prolonged death from diabetes related illness or cancer or something else. Would that be better for him?

And maybe we’d have had some tragic, stupid, falling out at some point. Not remained friends. Maybe we would have drifted apart. And then I wouldn’t have this perfect little part of my life, with all its tragi-comic and profound lessons that’s part of what make me who I am today. And I wouldn’t be standing here in front of you talking about him like this today. Would that be better for me? I cannot say.

I can say that a person came into my life that I had a strange and wonderful relationship with. We became great friends and as friends we cared a great deal for each other. He died too soon. But he made an indelible impression on me and who I am today, and I am good with that. It was just meant to be the way it was and I am happy for that gift.

Bad things, unhappy times are a part of life. Illness, death, misfortune are all part of living. Without these bitter pills, could I appreciate the sweet juice of a blissful autumn day nearly as well?

And to know that, to know that when bad things happen, when woe betides me, it is a part of the schema of life. To know that whatever personal troubles or misfortune are before me, these too shall pass and happiness is there for the taking.

And to know that life, the universe, is unfolding exactly as it should:

That makes me happy.