The promise of happiness

Most of us, I guess, grow up with the idea that we will find happiness in life, and that this is our entitlement. Often this is tied up with our spiritual belief that if we are good people, joy and fulfilment are our due, the prize, if you like, for keeping our side of the bargain. I call this the Hollywood dream – reflecting a world where bad people go to prison and good people go home, preferably hand in hand with their loved one of the opposite sex, stepping over the threshold of their gorgeous suburban bungalow. It is filled with the laughter of 2.4 children, the smell of happiness (perhaps a chicken roasting in the oven) and the detritus of the family pet (a smelly cloth house) tucked into a convenient corner.

In this world there is no hurt, no abuse, no arguments, no unfaithfulness, no pain, no disease and definitely no homosexuality. The truth, alas (or thankfully!), is far from this honey coated image. Never mind global poverty and inequality, disease, famine, war and oppression, the obvious horrors we try to ignore as we trawl the internet and dating sites for things and people to make us forget reality, even in suburbia all is not what it seems.

My somewhat melancholic musings are inspired (is that the right word here, perhaps “unearthed” would be a better choice?) by a gorgeous novel I’m reading: The Promise of Happiness by Justin Cartwright. I’ve talked about him before, I think in the context of his more recent work, To Heaven by Water. A friend commented that his novels bring characters to life who burrow their way into your psyche, leaving you struggling with feelings of loss when you reach the last page. This one is no exception.

What I love about it is that his characters are all too human – the mother and father are in a complex but stable relationship that’s been occasionally unfaithful, the son is about to marry the mother of his unborn child and realises he doesn’t love her but feels duty bound to marry, the slightly off kilter daughter dates older married men and uses cocaine, and the brilliant and successful daughter has just been released from a two year prison sentence for helping to procure a stolen art work for her manipulative and narcissistic boyfriend, who evaded prison. See what I mean, nothing suburban about this lot?

Yet their struggles for meaning and purpose (I think they survive through a kind of familiar and familial glue) are curiously exhilarating for me – it’s not only schadenfreude (I do like the idea of people being happy and successful, really) it’s that I see so many of my own struggles reflected in this rather endearing bunch of people. I’ve always said that if you peel away the surface of apparently happy lives, there is so much more darkness going on there (incest, kinky sex, hatred, fear, violence, hurt) than you could imagine. This doesn’t have to negate or invalidate the happy stuff, it’s just that I believe we are a mix and isn’t it more honest to admit this? In an Oprah world where good and bad are clear binaries, where sins are forgiven and people move on, where you attract goodness if you are good, where gratitude for what you have is the key to happiness, where anything is possible, failure and unhappiness are a sin and a sign of a lack of character and morals.

I reject this idea – I believe stuff happens and you have to just learn to ride out the waves of good and bad that characterise all our lives. Oh sure, some stuff is of our own making but we only have so much control of our lives. Isn’t “surrender” a more appropriate maxim here? Do your best to take meaning from life, and of course strive to hurt and harm less, but if we accept that we are all a mix of good and bad, darkness and light, then we judge ourselves, and others, a lot less. So no we do not deserve happiness, nor can we earn it, it’s just one of those things – and we should celebrate it, but not try to grasp it.