Krishnamurti
compared happiness to humility and suggested that:
Being humble is something you are and not something you do.
In fact, as
he saw it, the moment you became aware of being humble you weren’t humble
anymore – and if you became aware of being happy you weren’t happy anymore.
I’m not sure
that I agree with him.
The problem
as I see it is that most of us are confused and wouldn’t recognise happiness if
we tripped over it.
We are
taught that being happy is what people want to be, not what they are. This presupposes that being happy is not likely
to be where you’re at but somewhere else (Happiness
is a journey, not a destination); and that happiness is not a usual or normal
condition but something to be aspired to.
We are also taught
that happy is not how people usually feel but how they have to decide to be (You are only as happy as you decide to be
(attributed to Abe Lincoln)) .
Add to this
that we live in a world where nothing exists if it can’t be measured and you
have a recipe for rampant societal melancholy and wretchedness.
Measuring happiness
is where most of the SHAM practitioners (Self-help and Actualisation Movement)
suggest the biggest troubles start. That is wrong too.
The actual
problem is even thinking that happiness can be measured. How do you measure faith? How do you measure love? You can’t. Just like you can't measure happiness.
Because people
can’t figure out how to measure happiness for themselves, the media (ably
assisted by a happiness-seeking-convinced-that-it-is-unhappy public) has created
idealised pictures of how happy people look and how happiness looks – and that’s what
people try to be like. When they can’t
measure up, they’re even more unhappy than before.
Perhaps we
should stop trying to dissect happiness as if it were some unfortunate laboratory
rat or analyse it and simply accept that:
Happiness is a surprise.
You can’t buy it, chase it or spring it on yourself and it
will only happen when you’re not looking.
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