Happiness

A few weeks ago, I attended a speaker series featuring Dr. Laurie Santos, the happiness guru who teaches Yale’s most popular course on the science of happiness and the creator of the podcast The Happiness Lab. If you have not heard her speak or listen to her podcast, I highly recommend it. She reviewed her 10 strategies for happiness, which were simple things to incorporate into your everyday life.

Dr. Sanots defines happiness as “ the experience of joy, contentment, or positive well-being, combined with a sense that one’s life is good, meaningful, and worthwhile.” Later that night, as I reflected on the talk and read Dr. Santo’s definition of happiness, I realized that overall, I am happy. I mostly feel content in my life. 

Experiencing happiness alongside grief can be complicated.  For starters, I sometimes feel a sense of guilt when I am happy.  Some refer to this as “happiness guilt”.  Early in grief, I remember feeling intense guilt if I was laughing with a friend or enjoying watching one of my kids play a sport.  The guilt was triggered by thoughts of “How can I be happy, I lost my husband” or “Am I forgetting Mark?”  As I have healed a little more, the happiness guilt sometimes still rears its ugly head but it is less intense and it’s ok as I know it is just part of this process and really just being human. 

This brings me to another phenomenon I have learned on this journey.  You can experience multiple emotions at the same time, and they are often conflicting emotions. This was hard for this “black and white” thinker to wrap her brain around.  I would say that on any occasion when I am feeling happy, I am almost always also feeling sad because Mark is not here to share the experience with me.  This was difficult because my thought process was I would never  truly experience happiness again without the sadness and then this led me down the rabbit hole to anger and resentment.   I had to accept the feeling of sadness did not have to take away from the feelings of happiness.  I could experience both at the same time and that is ok. 

I want to go back to the first part of Dr. Santos’ definition of happiness, “the experience of joy”.   Joy is a word I have been focusing on for the last couple of months.  In fact, at the beginning of the year, I was praying and asking God to give me a word for the year and joy is what came to me. 

As I started to research the definition of joy, I started to get really confused. I thought joy was a fleeting moment of delight or excitement because of a particular event or moment.  However, what I am learning as I write this is that joy is a deeper emotion from within, lasting longer and independent from happiness.  Joy is a state of mind.  Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines joy as an experience “evoked by well-being, success, or good fortune or by the prospect of possessing what one desires”   The key difference between happiness and joy is that happiness tends to be achieved externally whereas joy tends to be achieved internally.  And lastly joy is a choice.

I am not sure where I stand on the joy continuum.  I do know that I want to experience more joy.  I am not sure what that looks like right now.  I recently heard a widow speak who said for about the first ten years of widowhood her hand covered her cup from the goodness of God, and once she decided to remove her hand from the cup, her cup was overflowing with joy.  This gave me hope.  I am still holding my hand over my cup.  I am not sure why.  It could be where I am in my grief journey, it could be fear, it could be just how I am wired.  Whatever it may be, I know I can have more joy. As I wrestle with this, I pray that God will reveal in my life where I can choose joy where I am holding my hand over my cup.   

The Lord in my shepherd, I shall not be want. He makes me lie down in green pastures, he leads me beside quiet waters, he restores my soul.  He guides me in paths of righteousness for his name’s sake.  Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil for you are with me; Your rod and your staff they comfort me. You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies.  You anoint my head with oil; my cup overflows.  Surely, goodness and love will follow meal the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.   Psalm 23

“On with the dance, let the joy be unconfined”  Mark Twain