LXVIII
THE SECRET OF HAPPINESS
What is the secret of happiness? I once asked Mary Anderson this question and she replied: “To find out what you want of life, and then to have the courage to take it. I wanted quiet, seclusion, home and husband and children, the ordinary domestic life of woman,” she went on. “I had the courage to leave the stage at the very height of my career. And I have had the courage to refuse every offer to go back, no matter how dazzling it was. I have also had the courage to stay in my sleepy little village and refuse to let myself be drawn into the brilliant whirl of London society. I have been happy because I knew what I wanted, and I have been brave enough to take it in spite of all temptations to be led into doing the things that I did not want to do.”
Undoubtedly this is one of the answers to the great riddle that we are always asking and that so few solve. A great many people are unhappy because they do not really know what they want. They have no clear vision of the thing they are seeking. They are torn between conflicting desires and never settle down to any one thing, and find contentment and peace in that. You see this exemplified in the men who are always changing from one occupation to another, and who work with their minds on their golf and play golf with their minds on their work. You see it in the women who are fretful and peevish wives and mothers, complaining of the burdens of domesticity and feeling that they have missed happiness in not following some career, and in the women who have followed careers and who are always bemoaning their loneliness because they have no families. Yet how seldom do the disgruntled, who lament their fate in life so loudly, have the courage to face about and take the road that they at least believe leads to happiness! We behold so many idle tears that we are inclined to believe there are vast numbers of human beings who get a kind of morbid pleasure out of misery.
But what is the secret of happiness? I give four guesses at the conundrum. The first is work, to keep so busy that we do not have leisure to think whether we are happy or not. There is no other pleasure comparable to the clean joy of being swallowed up in some useful, constructive work that calls forth every power of mind and body. Your own job, that you do competently, has for you a never-failing interest, a perpetual thrill that nothing else in the world can give. Only brainless idiots are content to loaf. Intelligent, thinking men and women must keep busy in order to be happy.
My second guess is that happiness is the bird in the hand and not the bird in the bush. If we are ever to be happy we must be happy now at the present moment. We cannot put it off until to-morrow. You are always hearing people say that they are going to do this and that when they get rich, that they are going to travel when they are old, they are going to play, they are going to take up old acquaintances, they are going to enjoy themselves five, ten, twenty years hence. But when the time comes that they have set to be happy in, they find that they have lost their capacity for enjoyment. Those who have inched and pinched and sweated every penny trying to accumulate a fortune have formed such a habit of parsimony that it is agony to them to spend money. Those who have denied themselves too much have lost all desire. Those who have stayed at home too long have become such a fixture on Main Street that they are lonesome and homesick everywhere else.
So the happy men and women are those who take the goods the gods provide each hour. They make a reasonable provision against the rainy day, and then they indulge themselves in the good clothes, the pretty home, the comfortable car, the palatable food, the little trips that are within their reach. They do not put off every pleasure until some mythical, problematic day, when they will be able to live in a palace and have a Rolls-Royce and Paris clothes and when they will be too old and rheumatic and set in their ways to want to do anything but sit by the fire in their own familiar chair. Never was there sounder philosophy conveyed than in the old comic opera ditty which said, “I want what I want when I want it,” and if we don’t take it then, it is dust and ashes in our teeth.
Happiness consists in simple things. We are always envying the rich and great, and think how happy they must be, but we might well pity them, for they have far more sources of sorrow than we have. Beyond a modest competence, riches are a burden, and money can become a curse that blights every natural joy. The millionaire is cut off from the greatest of all happiness—that of knowing himself loved for himself alone. He suspects the motive of every friend, he does not even trust the woman he marries, and he knows his wealth to be a blight upon his children. The real source of happiness is in enjoying simple things—a gorgeous sunset, a beautiful landscape, a clever book, a good dinner, the talk of a friend, the unfaltering love of husband or wife, a baby’s arms around your neck, a fine son and daughter filling you with pride and joy. These have no price tag on them. They may belong just as much to the poor man as the rich man. Indeed, they oftener do.
Finally, remember the song, “I Want to Be Happy, but I Can’t Be Happy Till I Make You Happy, Too.” In unselfishness, in doing good to others—that is the real answer to the secret of how to be happy.