On Learning Happiness

 Some years ago, my siblings and I created what we would imagine could be the titles to Mama's life story if it were to be filmed.

1. LIFE SUCKS!

2. Luluha Ako ng Dugo

3. Balang Araw, Mararamdaman Nyo Rin

4. I Have 3 Beautiful Children, 4 Adorable Grandchildren...ay, at Handsome Husband Pala. But Life Sucks Anyway!
5.The Many Angst of D

6. Survivor of Own Torments

7. I Live to Grieve

8. Why Me, Lord?

9. I'm Happy Being Unhappy

10. Disgruntled Granny, Sucking the Life of Unsuspecting Relatives 

     The titles were borne out of our frustration with having to deal with a mother who was to my mind pathologically unhappy. It all sounds really irreverent but humor was one way my siblings and I faced what was a pretty regular situation in our family.  It was the weapon we used to prevent our spirits from being weighed down too much. It took quite an effort (at least, for me) to soar away from the doldrums because unhappiness can be quite contagious. To this day, I wonder why none of us siblings ended up seeing the world in this dim light, or in psychological terms, how we managed to construe the world differently from our mother.

            In a Positive Psychology class I attended, our  discussions on Happiness validated my belief that it is how we view our life events, whether we interpret them as positive or negative, that dictates whether we experience happiness or its opposite. This much I gathered from my interactions with significant people in my life who exemplified the descriptions of people who could be considered happy or unhappy individuals. In the article by Sonja Lyubomirsky, it was stated that there are people who appear to have a “talent for happiness” in that they “see the world around them through rose-colored glasses, make out the silver lining even in misfortune, live in the present, and find joy in the little things from day to day.” Then there are people who, “even in the best of times, seem chronically unhappy, peering at the world through gray-colored spectacles, always complaining, accentuating the negative, dwelling on the downside of both the trivial and the sublime, and generally deriving little pleasure from life”.

            

            After going through the list of differences between happy and unhappy people and possible reasons for these differences, I could clearly see to where certain people in my life belonged and how living in separate subjective worlds affected the way they conducted their lives. Like watching scenes of my interactions with them, I now understood how their perception of their worlds differed in the “cognitive, judgmental, and motivational strategies” they used in making sense of their experiences. An eye-opener for me was the qualification that these operations were “largely automatically and without awareness.”

              It was also at this point that I begun to absolve myself of my almost nil record of success at trying to assuage the misery that these people periodically went through. My attempts to remind them of their blessings against the lower rate of failures and deprivations were largely unsuccessful to bring them to a state of happiness. And this led me to feel frustration, anger, and guilt for my inability to bring them to see a different point of view. Plainly stated, I could now forgive myself for these negative feelings if I could believe that there was really nothing I could do if there was no desire in them to change their perceptions.

            But looking back at our family’s experience, I would not entirely discount how life deprivations may contribute to one’s experience of happiness. I couldn’t say that using the objectivist-bottom up tradition to understand happiness is entirely useless. I still think that if Mama had the advantages of a “comfortable income, robust health, a supportive marriage, and lack of tragedy” in her life, she would have been a happier person. And this is where I guess I understand why Mama was the way she was. From her youth to her old age, deprivations, challenges, and tragedies were constantly thrown her way. Relative to how our lives have been so far, I can say we had it better than what she had.  Who can say how we would interpret life events if we had gone through what she did?

               And so when I read again the "movie titles" in the context of what I know now about happiness, I feel a tinge of regret for being harshly judgmental at that time. Maybe how I look at life differently from her, I owe to Mama. When I go back to the past I realize now that I had forgotten how her joy and celebratory spirit during successes and good times had become an inspiration for me to pursue that kind of life for myself. It was her strength to rise above tragedies that instilled that resolve in me not to drown in sorrow in the face of failures and instead turn to my blessings to lift me up.  Could it be I taught myself to be happy by using humor and gratitude as tools to help me through tough times?  If I did, am I teaching the same lessons to my children now? I hope that when they write about me in my old age, they will say they learned happiness from me.