The other night, while we were settling in for dinner, my partner asked me in passing, “Would you say that you’re happier now with me and our son than you were before us?” I had to think about for several moments. The answer wasn’t a resounding “yes” for me. The question was much deeper than a glib affirmative, even though that would make everyone feel better. It wasn’t a big “no” either. The joy of these two men who are riotous and loving is simply nothing I’ve experienced before. What can I compare it to anyway?
The easiest way to see life is as a continuum. After all, we are born and then every day we age incrementally. Our limbs grow, our brains grow, what we can do also grows (and then perhaps shrinks all the same at the end). We assume that every year, we’ll have something to which we can compare our previous years. Am I happier this year than last? Do I have more money? Am I stronger? Do I have more or fewer friends? And sometimes these are easier comparisons than not. You’d know if you had less money. That’s not hard.
Where the whole premise falls apart is when we start to account for experiences. As I get older, I realize that experiences are more like rooms in which we live. The structure around the room is likely the same - there is a roof, four walls, and likely a floor. What the room contains though might be markedly different. Objectively comparing the bathroom to the kitchen won’t make sense. They are two different rooms with two different purposes (hopefully!)
And so as we look at our lives as a series of experiences, it becomes harder to objectively make comparisons. My twenties and thirties were a great time of getting to know myself and often to test the limits of my own capabilities. With it came the sorting out of various feelings, perhaps retiring things that didn’t serve me and preparing myself to see life going forward with a bit of wisdom rather than a life that just happens. I had no comparison for what having a child might feel like, or being a manager, or thinking about my old age in reference to those I might leave behind. I didn’t know the joy of wandering through a bookshop with my spouse or introducing mango to my child. Am I happier? More tired? Who’s to say? I’m a different person now with experiences that are different.
I live in a different room.
Rebecca Solnit puts it well:
Questions about happiness generally assume that we know what a happy life looks like. Happiness is understood to be a matter of having a great many ducks lined up in a row — spouse, offspring, private property, erotic experiences — even though a millisecond of reflection will bring to mind countless people who have all those things and are still miserable…
The problem may be a literary one: we are given a single story line about what makes a good life, even though not a few who follow that story line have bad lives. We speak as though there is one good plot with one happy outcome, while the myriad forms a life can take flower — and wither — all around us.
Even those who live out the best version of the familiar story line might not find happiness as their reward. This is not necessarily a bad thing. I know a woman who was lovingly married for seventy years. She has had a long, meaningful life that she has lived according to her principles. But I wouldn’t call her happy; her compassion for the vulnerable and concern for the future have given her a despondent worldview. What she has had instead of happiness requires better language to describe. There are entirely different criteria for a good life that might matter more to a person — honor, meaning, depth, engagement, hope.
Perhaps this is why I have a hard time generalizing, especially as I get older. It’s a matter of language. Happiness is nebulous and doesn’t encompass the nuances that we live in our lives, the colour of each day. I’m maybe more hopeful, less fearful, less rigid, more thoughtful - and these can all change with the passage of time. Those things are too deep to be contained in a single word. My room is not one thing.
This week I turn 40. I know time is arbitrary in a sense, but we must at least follow the crowd in a way. 40 is a different room. I don’t know the lay of the land here yet, but it will have its own creaking floors. The light will come in a bit differently during the day, and I might have to add or take away a few things to feel like I can live here. Only time will tell of course. These are not things that come suddenly.
As for happiness, it’s much too broad a brush with which to paint life. It’s also a bit of a fool’s errand - and maybe a disservice to narrate a life well lived. And so we’ll move forward with that understanding. And things will seemingly get more complex and the answers won’t be brief. I maintain that life is deceptively simple - the meaning we ascribe is what matters in the end.
For today though, I’ll see the smile on my family’s face as they wait for me to read the birthday card they got for me. And perhaps later, we’ll all have some double chocolate fudge cake that my mother has baked for me since I was a little one. Indeed, perhaps some things never change.
April Morning
You are living the life
you wanted as if you'd known
what that was but of course
you didn't so you'd groped
toward it feeling for what
you couldn't imagine, what
your hands couldn't tell you,
for what that shape could be.
This Sunday the rain turns cold
again and steady but the window
is slightly open and there is the vaguest
sense of bird song somewhere in the gaps
between the buildings because it's spring
the calendar says and the room where
you are reading is empty yet full
of what loves you and this is the day
that you were born.