Happiness

I recently got to live out a long-dreamt-of fantasy. Specifically, a skiing trip in the Swiss Alps. There is some nuanced background to this fantasy of skiing. I would often refer to it in my teaching on the elusive nature of happiness. How desire and its realisation are characteristically discordant.

In my classes, I would tell a long story about a hypothetical protagonist – the subject of my psycho-philosophical parables – imagining him or herself being happy once (s)he achieved her long-sought desire. In this case, a dreamt of a skiing trip.  And, as the story would go, with each step (s)he took on her journey, that moment of imagined bliss would prove elusive. Always in a state of infinite recursion, where (s)he would continually imagine the next moment would bring the desired state of euphoric bliss.

Anyway, something along those lines. I don’t want to unpack it exhaustively here, but merely share it as a background to my own- somewhat unexpected – incarnation of this very experience. I had exhaustively planned and now finally executed a European tour, with the denouement arguably being a week of skiing in the Swiss Alps. The irony of my example and caution to my students, in which I identified with or was persuaded by my desire, was not lost on me.

However, being the shrewd psychological analyst and a great believer in the biblical injunction, “be wise as serpents”, that I am, I was sufficiently perspicacious not to script happiness as a necessary variable for the evaluation of the trip’s merit.

To put it more simply,

I neither demanded nor anticipated happiness as a precondition in my expectation and imagining of what this experience would be like. That lack of added pressure: to actually enjoy the experience was a big help. To put it in the Lacanian frame, it’s like telling the big Other who demands of the subject, in this case me, that he “be happy”, to get fucked. This then allows a certain freedom and self-agency in the taking up and meaning making of the experience.

Okay, so that’s a bit of background to what I want to share with you.

As the fates would have it, there was a moment amid the maelstrom of this experience where, surprisingly, I felt something…not exactly “happiness”, but something. Allow me the freedom, if you will, not to reduce it to a definite signifier just yet. Suffice to say I felt something wherein, for a moment, the chronic default experience of existential, and in this case also physical, suffering abated.

Prior to our skiing trip, we were in Italy for about 10 days. I used the opportunity to do as much walking as I could. I found this the most effective way to soak up and more fully immerse myself in that beautiful country, so rich in history, culture, and art.  My Machiavellian reasoning and adherence to the Law of Thermodynamics: more specifically, that I could offset my rather substantial caloric intake (one doesn’t visit  Italy to diet)  by such activity.  also contributing to this strategy.

Good and well.

However, by the time we arrived in Saas Fee to ski and did the three days of skiing lessons, my legs were already shredded from all the walking! What was fairly challenging already – learning a completely new skill and method of moving through space – skiing, became insanely challenging for me after the first day. My legs felt like lead! It took a fair amount of resolve not to simply bail and return to the comfort of the hotel we were staying in.

As it turned out, I didn’t bail.

Motivated primarily for fear of the shame when, upon my return home, I would have to confess my failure, and less so, but also wanting to demonstrate to my two sons by example, rather than mere lip service, the virtue of not giving up when the going got a little tough.

I confess it is embarrassing to characterise skiing in the Swiss Alps as “tough”, but I take refuge in the fact that you undoubtedly do not realise just how lazy and what a comfort seeker I am. For me, sticking with it took a fair degree of resolve.

Anyway, I share this bit of background to provide context for this experience I referred to earlier, of momentary respite from the grind of learning to ski.

The moment occurred, more than once, whilst I was riding the ski lift up the slope. This is a device that you attach yourself to and that then drags you up to the top of the slope.  It feels great! Suddenly and in contrast to the mental and physical demands of the lesson, I was effortlessly moving through space, on the slopes, with this breathtaking view of the Alps, and breathing in its rarefied atmosphere. It was during this precise moment that the thought occurred to me, Remember to have fun!

Being philosophically inclined, I couldn’t help extrapolating from this experience to the more generalised experience of existence in the world. I wondered about the nature of this fleeting experience of effortless joy and how it is comparable, or a metaphor of sorts, to something similar in life.

This is my attempt to answer that question.

Let’s start from a point of honesty. I always think that it is salutary to cut through the usual bullshit when is discussing matters of the soul.

I think we can agree that Westray, from The Counsellor (Ridely Scott, Cormack McCarthy, 2013), calls it when he says,

I’ve seen it all, counsellor, and it’s all bullshit.

Let me explain. Although I guess for anyone who has lived for a while, it’s  a pretty self-evident truth.

As a child, you dream of romance, adventure, fame, and fortune. You believe in something. You believe that life means something. You aspire to live, if not a “meaningful” life exactly, because as a child, you typically don’t think in those terms, but a life full of meaning, beauty, love, enchantment, friendship…and so on.

Just think about friendship for a moment.

Friends seemed an infinite resource at a certain age. (Now, was it just me that thought this way, or do we all?) Not that I had an infinite number of friends! I was always a bit of a loner, but the possibility of new friendships seemed infinite. Like the old cliché, there are plenty of fish in the sea, type of thing.

Of course, as anyone who has lived for a while will attest, that’s simply not true, is it? On the contrary, a single genuine friendship is of infinite value. And even if one were so blessed to have such a friend, it is invariably peppered with disappointments and disillusionment. More than one true friend and you’re wealthy beyond measure.

The point being, what we soon find out is that possibility is not as fecund as she seemed through the naïve and idealistic lenses of our youthful selves. Not only the possibility of friendship, but all possibilities are sorely wanting in supply.

Life, as we come to realise, often too late, is a far more limited affair than we are disposed to believe as children.

Beyond that, though, what happens?

We “grow up”. Read: reach sexual maturity, and then the real shit starts, doesn’t it? Then one is obliged to deal with the social, cultural, and peer pressure- what Jacques Lacan, the French psychoanalyst and philosopher, termed the “big Other”- to be “successful”. However, you or the hypothetical subject may define that. Roughly and universally, though, something like this: get ahead, make an impression on the world, learn a skill, get a job, or even better: a vocation (!), a romantic (i.e. sexual) partnership, mate and produce offspring, and of course, the wet dream of capitalism, become, at least in some modest sense, a capitalist. And then later, live a “meaningful” or heaven help us, an “authentic” life.

As if all of that weren’t enough, you need to be good at all this shit, you need to look good, remain perennially sexually desirable – way beyond an age that in previous generations you were gratefully let off that hook, have friends – Jesus Christos, let’s not forget about the friends. Be fit! My god, that’s cardinal today, isn’t it, be fucking fit. And “fit” here means stay youthful, healthy, and beautiful more or less until we bury you.

There’s more, of course. What’s the latest bullshit I see on social media, be a “high-value man”, or something along those lines, essentially though something like look cool, be cool, and strive to outdo the x billion other dummies on Instagram.

Now, call me a cynic, but all of that seems a tall order in the age of late capitalism.

It was always a tall order. This postmodern ideal of success. But let’s face it, challenging is becoming now nigh absurd. These demands on the youth amid the current zeitgeist and world-order, feel a little like asking the youth to play the fiddle whilst Rome burns.

Nevertheless, it is not really my intention here to make a statement about society.  Rather, I am addressing this to the aspiring subject seeking this elusive success and authentic life, such as it may be.

It is to you, the hypothetical subject, I now address myself.

Even assuming you’re able to sink your teeth into this aspiration of a successful and individuated (as we term it in Jungian parlance) life, a chimera that it might be, there are a few snakes to watch out for whilst you attempt to ascend these ladders. I’ll be honest, and it is genuinely not my intention to put you off by speaking plainly. I do so rather to help you orient yourself on this journey. To provide some realistic and grounding context within which you might be able to evaluate your progress on this continuum.

Be aware of entropy.

Left to their own, things, including you and your life, move incrementally and inexorably toward greater disorder and corruption. Beyond entropy, erasure is also an ever-present looming possibility.

Let’s deal with these two issues and how they are likely to impact your aspirations.

If you’ll allow me, let me borrow the words and sentiments from F Scott Fitzgerald’s masterpiece, ‘The Great Gatsby’, that great and quintessential American novel. Gatsby is characterised as exhibiting,

An extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again.

This is good. More than good. Essential. I trust and wish that you, too, are possessed of such an optimistic spirit and robust soul. For without you are surely lost before you even begin.

To live and endure, to continue moving forward, is an act of defiance in the face of the inexorable and inevitable.

You will, it must be said, all too frequently, trip over your feet of clay.

Although you possess hope and a certain ambition, you are not immaculate, your resources are not unlimited, and your destiny is constrained within this entropic space-time continuum.

This doesn’t imply you shouldn’t have hope, and that you shouldn’t fight the good fight. As part of this trip, I was able to attend, for the first time in my life, mass at Saint Pietro’s Basilica, with His Holiness Pope Leo XIV. The message from the Church for this jubilee year was of the virtue and integrity of hope.

“Spes non confundit” (Hope does not disappoint).

The mass included a reading from Isaiah 35.

The desert and the parched land will be glad;

    the wilderness will rejoice and blossom.

Like the crocus, 2 it will burst into bloom;

    it will rejoice greatly and shout for joy.

The glory of Lebanon will be given to it,

    the splendor of Carmel and Sharon;

they will see the glory of the Lord,

    the splendor of our God.

3 Strengthen the feeble hands,

    steady the knees that give way;

4 say to those with fearful hearts,

    “Be strong, do not fear;

your God will come,

    he will come with vengeance;

with divine retribution

    he will come to save you.”

5 Then will the eyes of the blind be opened

    and the ears of the deaf unstopped.

6 Then will the lame leap like a deer,

    and the mute tongue shout for joy.

Water will gush forth in the wilderness

    and streams in the desert.

7 The burning sand will become a pool,

    the thirsty ground bubbling springs.

In the haunts where jackals once lay,

    grass and reeds and papyrus will grow.

8 And a highway will be there;

    it will be called the Way of Holiness;

    it will be for those who walk on that Way.

The unclean will not journey on it;

    wicked fools will not go about on it.

9 No lion will be there,

    nor any ravenous beast;

    they will not be found there.

But only the redeemed will walk there,

10     and those the Lord has rescued will return.

They will enter Zion with singing;

    everlasting joy will crown their heads.

Gladness and joy will overtake them,

    and sorrow and sighing will flee away.

Beautiful passage, isn’t it?

Good and well.

More than ever before in my life, lived mostly as an atheist, I have come to appreciate this doctrine of hope. Hope in the face of suffering. I can’t personally guarantee that the lame will walk again and the mute sing. I leave that to the Pope. However, I do think a position of hope is virtuous and the only sane response in the face of this life and its inevitable challenges.

Pessimism is the canon of the coward. Pessimists are tragically absurd characters. Finding smug solace in their self-satisfied and tragically inflated egos. As if they alone in all the world recognised suffering! What delusion! What hubris!

This doctrine of hope appropriately acknowledged, there is an important caveat. Hope does not imply its realised objective. Unless we understand its objective to be the state of hope itself.

Let’s return to Gatsby, our quintessential American hero. He reveals himself to Nick Carraway (and us) in the following demand he makes on himself.

My life, old sport, my life… my life has got to be like this.

[Raises finger to follow shooting star]

It’s got to keep going up.

Such an aspiration, whilst understandable, and cruelly what we are taught to desire, is ill-fated.

You are going to fail. That is inevitable.

Others will fail you.

Life itself will invariably let you down.

Most of the dreams and fantasies you cherished as a child will turn out to be chimeras haunting your adulthood. It’s a cruel fucking world. Make no mistake about it. You cannot outrun suffering. The sooner you make peace with that, the better off you’ll be.

But, and this is a big but, don’t allow yourself to be downtrodden by this revelation, in whatever form it visits you. Take solace here from Blaise Pascal.

Man is only a reed, the weakest in nature, but he is a thinking reed. There is no need for the whole universe to take up arms to crush him: a vapour, a drop of water is enough to kill him. But even if the universe were to crush him, man would still be nobler than his slayer, because he knows that he is dying and the advantage the universe has over him. The universe knows none of this.

Returning to the metaphor of the ski lift – remember the ski lift 😊.

What is its equivalent as metaphor for existence?

Although suffering is inevitable and a substantial dimension of this experience that actually lets you know you’re alive, don’t let it define you. Don’t suffer o’er much because of your suffering. Don’t be defined by it. Your soul is plastic and spirit transcendent.

What defines you and your character is not the inevitable setbacks and experiences of pain and suffering, but the way you respond to its challenges. This is initiatory if you allow it to be, awakening you to ever deeper experiences of being alive and all it implies.

Allow yourself to be carried effortlessly up those lofty Alps, to breathe that rarefied atmosphere and to enjoy the ride.

Once you have truly accepted the inevitability of fate, you are liberated from its tyranny.  And none of this implies that there are not wells of euphoric ecstasy to be found along the way. When you do find them, drink deeply.

I did, and I continue to.

To share a brief moment of this ecstasy with you by way of conclusion. I learnt to ski in a few days. Not like they sent me an invitation to the upcoming Winter Olympics in Milan, but I learned how to ski down a moderate slope, keeping life and limb intact. It was and is probably one of the most euphoric experiences I have ever had. It has left an imprint on my soul such that, having done it alone, this life has been a worthwhile experience.

At the start of the new year, I wish you grace and good fortune. And if you are suffering, if your spirit is distressed, know that you are not alone, and this experience is not without meaning and even beauty at times.

We are kindred spirits, and my wish for you is to live courageously and with a full heart.

God bless you, my dearest friend.

Until we speak again,

Stephen.