That Ever Elusive Happiness

"Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know," said Ernest Hemingway. It is interesting that Hemingway would observe thus; but come to think of it, for a large part of the intelligent population this is true. The question is why? For it is not like they choose to be unhappy. Why is happiness that ever elusive component of an intelligent thinking human life?

Kant proposed the following rules for happiness, "something to do, someone to love, something to hope for." By that definition, most intelligent thinking humans have something to do and someone to love; albeit these might be in brief spurts of their life span. The problem then probably lies with something to hope for.

Living in the postmodern existential world that we do, our deepest sense of longing seems to be eternally hoping that something worth hoping for comes along. For as it has long been said, to hope is to be human. Yet the unspoken concept imbibed in all our minds seems to be as Aristotle declared, "Hope is a waking dream." It would seem that being stuck in the midst of this deep chasm, between the deep seated need of our human self to find hope to live and the bellowing want of our minds to strip ourselves of an unseen reality; more often than not as a sublimation to keep ourselves from bring ravaged by the reality of non-events in the form of failed hopes - we seem to be naturally inclining ourselves towards the void and bitter pessimism of having nothing that holds any meaning in our lives. We seek to alleviate our suffering by choosing death over life. We choose to live with the notion that Nietzsche proposed "Hope in reality is the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torments of man." 

Yet, by doing so we rob ourselves of our own happiness and in turn try to fill such void in our lives with everything other than hope; only to perpetuate the cycle to infinity. For all the while, we do not realize that without hope or the need for it, our lives as humans can never be truly lived. Our failed hopes are but a blip on the screen of the grand scale of our lives and in trying to shield ourselves from the ever possible danger of another failed hope, we degrade our own lives to merely an existence. Jürgen Moltmann would write about the same, "Totally without hope one cannot live. To live without hope is to cease to live. Hell is hopelessness. It is no accident that above the entrance to Dante's hell is the inscription: "Leave behind all hope, you who enter here." "- Theology of Hope.

But what does one hope for and how? In the world full of hatred, despair, pain and hurting, where do we turn to draw our courage; courage for our heart to hope and our mind to dream? Living as we do, forlorn as we are in the absence of true happiness and joy from our lives; our need to find hope was never greater. 

Cicero noted that While there's life, there's hope. Carl Sandberg would go on to say, "A baby is God's opinion that the world should go on." Our hope lies in life itself. Ellen Hopkins could not have captured it better when she wrote, "in a woman's womb. another chance. to make the world better." There is hope as long as we live. The reason for our hope is life itself. "As long as there's life, there's hope" - Tamora Pierce.

Regarding the how we could find hope J.R.R. Tolkien wrote, "Oft hope is born when all is forlorn," in The Return of the King. When we see pain, destruction, suffering our emotion to it is quite naturally forlorn, but our reaction to it ever ought to be hopeful. Michael Jackson is known to have said, "In a world filled with hate, we must still dare to hope. In a world filled with anger, we must still dare to comfort. In a world filled with despair, we must still dare to dream. And in a world filled with distrust, we must still dare to believe." For as Chesterton observed, "Hope is the power of being cheerful in circumstances that we know to be desperate." After all, "Hope is a verb with its shirtsleeves rolled up." like David Orr said. We find hope in our ability to change - ourselves and the world around us.

Regarding the where we find hope, "We carry within us the wonders we seek without us” observed Thomas Browne. For many of us a logical conclusion leading from how we find hope becomes being hopeful of finding hope within us. Sadly, i propose we couldn't be more wrong. For when a creature so desperately longing for the need for hope to live tries to find hope within itself; it voids itself of its own store of hope, thus pummeling itself into another bout of hopelessness - when the hope within has been spent on the world without. This then brings us back eventually to the same existential state of life, as we try in perpetuity to refill our store of hope from ourselves. No. The answer to where we find our hope is not within. We find joy within. We find peace within. But we cannot find hope within alone. Finite that we are, we are ever in need of refilling our portion of hope from without.

So where then do we find our refilling of hope? I propose we find it in love. When we have someone to love who loves us back, our portion of hope is always full. We let go of our existential pessimism, being pumped up with the hope of happiness we have before us. We are driven to do and be our best for our hope drawn from the love we share with this person, drives and feeds us. For some, this is even true of the love they share with their pets. For some like me, it also stems from the metaphysical love i share with God. But regardless of the person or being, a shared love fuels our hearts to hope and gives our minds the courage to dream. And in that sweet spot we find happiness.

For as humans, we are driven by 3 forces - an appetite, the need for security and the need to belong or feel loved. Where something to do fulfills our appetites, someone to love provides us with a sense of security; the love we share gives us something to hope for, long for and dream about. It is then that we find ourselves truly happy; in the perfect collusion and fulfillment of all the fundamental forces that drive our being as humans.

I therefore posit that the ever elusive happiness we find ourselves yearning for in our lives as intelligent thinking humans can only be found from finding our hope in the love we share, with the someone / life / being we love. It gives us a hope for our future and a happiness as its present. That ever elusive happiness if very much within our grasp; should we only find our hope in the love we share.