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Yesterday--on his way to making a completely different point--the owner of the company I work for asked me if I knew any happy old men.
I hesitated only a moment before answering, "yes. My father was happy. But I get your point, he may be the only one I can recall." He had known my father, as people who move in different circles but live in the same small town know each other; and he knew that, for the most part, my statement was true. My father was a simple man in the sense of what he needed and what he wanted. In his later years, those we were talking about, he spent as much time on the water as he could and he was, I believe, genuinely happy.
My answer only momentarily slowed my boss, however, who went on to make his point that most old men are not happy, although he couldn't really articulate why that was a universal truth. So there before me was a man who is by any measure a success, a man truly loved and admired by many, admitting to the unhappiness of it all.
Happy is a an easy, carefree word: from a combination of hap, meaning lucky, with a jaunty y added for, I guess, adjectival purposes. We can still see remnants of hap in happenstance and perhaps. From whence it came, happiness was a something that happened to us, a state of being that, in essence, was a fortunate occurrence.
But oddly enough, satisfaction comes to us from the same Indo-European root that gives us the word sad. Running that root through English, we get sated and tired as well; in other words, to have attained your goal, to have had your fill, is somehow the opposite of happy. Philosophers, no doubt, could wend these corridors of etymological history for a long, boring lecture (and they have, trust me), but this morning I am only interested in what makes one happy as opposed to sad.
I had a friend who battled HIV/AIDS for many years before losing his life to it over a decade ago--yet to the very end he was one of the happiest people I have ever known. An artist and truly kind man, he suffered greatly for many years, yet plumbed the depths of happiness every day of his life. He explained, to anyone who would listen, that happy is something he decided to be after being unhappy for too many years. His approach was to stop waiting for it to be thrust upon him but to appropriate and own his good fortune.
In my mind--which hasn't come to any firm conclusion--there is something to say about happiness being a state of longing or the experience of the journey itself rather than the end: that each day can present us with a chance to be slightly less than sated with life. Perhaps we do choose to be happy. Perhaps we can all, like my old man, spend that time upon the water, knowing that while a cancer may move within us, the line where the horizon marks our destination is a point we will never reach--but that the journey toward that point, while consuming the self, may never leave us sated.
For Ron--I miss you dearly my friend.
Grab a cup of coffee and pull up a chair. What makes you happy?