by Paul Payne
Delivered at Northwest Unitarian Universalist Congregation
on May 3, 2015
Several of the fairy tales and stories I grew up hearing ended with the words “And they lived happily ever after.” I didn’t give those words a lot of thought then. In fact, when I imagined myself taking part in those stories, I didn’t spend that time pretending I was living happily ever after. Once I defeated a monster, I usually went on to the next adventure. The words “Happily Ever After” weren’t much different than the words “The End” in my mind.
The church I grew up in didn’t seem to believe much happiness was possible in this life at all. Religious leaders I heard as a child often spoke of the negative, painful nature of this human life. They taught that life on earth was supposed to be hard, but if we believed, we would go to a place called Heaven after we died. In Heaven, they taught, the inhabitants would live in ultimate happiness forever. They wouldn’t get sick; they wouldn’t have problems. In my child’s view of their theology, I even got the impression that the people who went to Heaven would magically know how to play musical instruments without lessons and be able to sing together without even attending choir practice. On rare occasions, I worried that Heaven might get boring after a while. I didn’t dare ask about that and I felt guilty and scared for even thinking it.
For the most part, I spent much more time then thinking about my happiness in the life I was in as opposed to a possible after life. It was in junior high school when I first heard the idea that I was more responsible for my happiness than external circumstances or other people around me. It was during a class where my guidance counselor talked about how we controlled our own emotions. She noted that she did not believe as some did that we could always decide to be happy in every situation, but she believed there were many times where we could choose how we react to things we didn’t like.
Later in life, I had a bout with clinical depression. I took my therapist’s suggestion to keep a gratitude journal where each day I would record a few simple things that made me feel happy. While I had heard this suggestion from many people including my own UU minister, I had never bothered to try it. The gratitude journal was not a cure, but I was surprised how much a little change in perspective helped. I don’t always write in my gratitude journal every day now, but I find that doing so generally helps me feel happier.
Despite my earlier doubts about “happily ever afters” or eternal happiness being based on perfect external factors, I still find myself thinking “If only this or that was different…” I suspect the unthought portion of that fragment is “then I’d be happy.”
It’s an ongoing spiritual practice for me that I sometimes forget, but when I do become conscious of the process and change my perspective, even slightly, I often notice an increase in my happiness.
(image credit: “Happily Ever After” by Flickr user Quinn Dombrowski)