Q: With that awful virus that is going around our Grade 12 graduates have chosen to leave their ceremonial celebration until the early fall.
They are hoping that the pandemic will by then have subsided and that somehow they can have a normal graduation without running too much interference with the fall harvest.
For me, this is good news. It is going to give me more time to prepare my talk. The students have asked me to be their feature speaker. I am honoured that they would pick me, but at the same time I am a touch nervous about this thing.
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The theme of their graduation is “A Quest for Happiness.” How in the heck am I going to talk about happiness?
At first I thought it would be easy, but I was wrong. It is complicated. I am looking all over the place for ideas to help me along with my talk and I quite naturally thought of you and your column. If you have some thoughts about happiness please pass them on. I can use all of the help I can get.
A: Well, you are certainly right about this much, that speaking or writing about happiness is much more difficult than it might appear. Funny, isn’t it? All of us think that we know what happiness is but if I asked just about anyone to sit down and write out a universal definition for happiness they probably could not do it. All of us think that we know and understand happiness but in fact we seldom agree on what it is. What is happiness for me is different than what it is for you.
This much we know about happiness — it is a lousy personal goal. If happiness is a bowl of cherries, then I will be happy if in fact I get a bowl of cherries. But I won’t be quite so happy with the next bowl of cherries and if I get obsessed with this thing by the time I have managed to gobble down my 43rd bowl of cherries, I will be so sick of them I will be petitioning the government to have them banned from the supermarket. Cherries do not bring happiness and happiness, like cherries, is not a reasonable goal.
Happiness is the byproduct of any number of personal challenges confronting the path on life’s journey. It is that feeling I get when I know that I have successfully put that seed into the ground and done my part for preparing my fields. It is that feeling I get when I put together a thousand piece jigsaw puzzle, that same feeling I have when I bake a perfecto lasagna and not a lot different than the feeling I have when my young children settle into a peaceful sleep again tonight.
Let me share with you four personal challenges contributing to happiness.
The first challenge is a sense of belonging. Your students need in some way to leave home. They have to find their own place in their community, maybe even their worlds, and to get a sense that they belong there. People who do not belong are for the most part unsettled and most likely unhappy.
The second challenge is purpose. We have to have some sense that we are contributing to the well being of someone, something or someplace. Making huge money is great, but if you are just going to let it sit in the bank, you are not going to be happy and neither is anyone else.
The third challenge is transcendence. Somewhere along the way I need to see that all of those little circles I have made while driving my tractor, my sprayer and my combine are contributing to the well being of the world, feeding the world. This whole thing goes way beyond me and my personal worries. And isn’t that great? It is something spiritual, maybe even philosophical, and therein lies a sense of happiness.
The fourth challenge is to write my personal story. Your students have just spent 18 or so years trying to please their parents, trying to satisfy their teachers, and trying to be at peace with their friends. Now is the time for them to start staking out their own territories. They need to rewrite their own storybooks. Who am I? What is so unique about me? What can I nurture into my own sense of personal identity? Happiness is virtually impossible without identity, but remember the goal is identity, not happiness.
By the way, I hope you will congratulate the students on their choice of themes for their graduation. It is a terrific topic. I do not know of many grads that are so clearly philosophical.
