You may have difficulty explaining what you understand happiness to be, but you feel that deep in your heart you know what it is.
Unhappiness often comes from the frustration of our elemental drives – the acquisitive drive, the drive for status, the sex drive, the drive to understand and to create and to control.
But we all learn that satisfaction of those drives does not guarantee happiness, and we sense that more is needed.
People who experience happiness display two distinctive characteristics: they work competently at tasks that have meaning for them and they have good relations with others.
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Sir William Osler, a distinguished Canadian physician, wrote this: “Happiness lies in the absorption in some vocation which satisfies the soul.” But this needn’t be a job that has a mantle of prestige and brings great material reward. Looking after a home and caring for small children, delivering the mail, looking after a building or repairing a car, waiting tables in a restaurant, working on an assembly line – these tasks can be as productive of happiness as is doing complicated surgery or painting a masterpiece or managing a great corporation.
The key here is in striving to do your work as well as you can.
Most important are your relations with those who count most in your life – your family and your friends and those with whom you work.
You need them and they need you. It is in response to these reciprocal needs that you come to happiness.
The principal ground of happiness is in the capacity to love and to accept love.
Special kinds of love are operative in marriage and in family life, and these are important in the coming to happiness.
But a wider kind of love is also essential, the love that is presented in the Bible as the active, sometimes sacrificial, willing of the real good of others.
Much of our happiness comes in our giving and receiving of that kind of love.
You cannot find happiness by searching for it; it comes to you only as a byproduct of your trying to serve the good of others.
