To what extent is happiness accessible to everyone?

by Katie G | Apr 11, 2021 | To what extent is happiness accessible to everyone?, Uncategorized

“1. Happiness is not objective.

2. If nothing but happiness existed, we wouldn’t have the ability to notice our own happiness.

3. Being happy isn’t the only beautiful experience in life.

—

I’m Taoist. One of my favorite lines of the Tao Te Ching is from Poem Two. The translation I love most (Ursula K. Le Guin) goes like this:

“Everybody on earth, knowing that beauty is beautiful, makes ugliness. Everybody knowing that goodness is good, makes wickedness.”

These are human distinctions and human inventions and human definitions.

To make happiness, we make sadness.

Not only do we create these definitions ourselves, we then all go around disagreeing with each other about them!

Happiness is not objective.

—

More Tao Te Ching, Poem Two from Ursula K. Le Guin:

“For being and non-being arise together.”

And from the Feng, English, and Lippe translation:

“Therefore having and not having arise together.”

We can’t be happy or have happiness without also being able not to be happy or not to have happiness.

Ask a totally red-green colorblind person to tell you what red and green mean to them, without thinking of what anyone else has ever told them. Tell them to use only their personal experience. They’re going to tell you about grey.

It is contrast that makes things visible or noticeable.

How weird would you feel if you didn’t know what sadness or anger or fear were? What if none of us did?

If we were all happy, we would just call it “emotion” or “normal.”

If nothing but happiness existed, we wouldn’t have the ability to notice our own happiness.

—

But we can absolutely all have happy times in our lives – and more importantly, we can recognize more qualities of a moment, a person, or a life than just “happy.”

The idea of even one person* never experiencing happiness could probably power the Infinite Improbability Drive through a significant hyperspatial leap. Theoretically it’s possible, and I’m sure we could imagine scenarios, but I’ll just make my next point instead.

Think of the music you like. Is it always happy music that you like the most? No, lots of us get sick of Christmas carols or sappy, overplayed pop love songs.

Well, in order to write sad songs, angry songs – to create anything unhappy in any artistic medium that anyone else is gonna deeply relate to, you have to know unhappiness personally or through someone very close to your heart.

Do you like Linkin Park? Three Day’s Grace? Nirvana?

You know that beautiful music did not come out of happy people.

I mean, seriously, have you listened to anything by Kesha or Lorde or Lady Gaga recently?

Yet we also know those artists had happy times in their lives.

Do you like *any* music based in rock? R&B? Hip-hop? Jazz? Ragtime?

These are genres – vast, international genres – rooted in music that is literally. called. the.

BLUES.

Where would music be without the horrific, bloody, painful past of the slave trade?

NO-FUCKING-WHERE.

And yet, BEAUTIFUL, even HAPPY music evolved from bloody roots.

Swing dancing and club dancing are some of the most blissful, fun experiences I’ve ever had in my life. I know where those roots go, though. It wasn’t happiness that gave me my happy music to dance to.

Strange Fruit is one of the most deeply moving, bone-chiling, gut-wrenching, breathtaking songs I’ve ever heard. That song is so beautiful and meaningful and powerful that I usually have to stop whatever I’m doing, no matter who’s singing it, so I can shut my eyes, listen close, sing along, and play it twice. Happy?? Of-fucking-course not. And yet it’s probably one of my top ten favorite songs – even as much as I hate picking favorites.

I think a bluesy ruby is more beautiful than a sparkly pop diamond any day.

Being happy isn’t the only beautiful experience in life.