Happiness

            On New Year’s Eve, an estimated crowd of one million people will mass in Times Square to watch the ball come down. “Happy New Year” will scream the revelers. But what, I wonder, would actually bring them happiness in the new year?  

            For our Founding Fathers happiness was something to be pursued, one of those inalienable rights endowed by our Creator. It was clear that independence from England is what would make Adams, Jefferson, and Franklin happy. It doesn’t get any more serious than that, considering it was going to take a war to gain that independence. But what about the folks in Times Square? How would they define happiness?

            Most of us would agree that world peace and the end of war would make us happy. But that kind of happiness is too impersonal. What causes one to be happy is often something simple and immediate. For the homeless man sleeping on a New York City grate, it might be a warm bed; for the 10-year old girl, the bike she got for Christmas; for my wife, getting to see her great-grandkids over the holidays.

            True happiness, I prefer to think, is something that comes from deep inside. Call it spiritual, if you like. Jon Voight, in a recent interview with Mark Levin, talked about a trip he had taken to Russia where he found the people looking very unhappy: they walked with heads down and would not look at him in the eye. He thought these people had a fear of strangers resulting perhaps from decades of deprivation and abuse, a people with a deadened spirituality. A people without laughter.

            Voight’s characterization of Russian people may have been too severe and certainly too broad. But he made a good point. Contrast that with this simple anecdote. The other day my wife and I were shopping at Food Lion when she suddenly burst out laughing for no apparent reason. “What’s so funny?” I asked. She pointed at her feet…her shoes didn’t match. We both laughed out loud. And then my wife shared this little absurdity with another woman, a shopper and a perfect stranger. She burst out laughing, too. It was a joyous moment for the three of us. Silly, perhaps, but a bit of happiness that Jon Voight might have observed would not have happened in Russia.

             Happy New Year, everyone, in maters big and small.