Is There an Injustice to Being Happy

Does one find happiness or does it find you?  Are you already wired with happiness from the day we're born?  Happiness has eluded me most of my life and it's been a quest to understand why one person is happy and another can be miserable.  In the recent film Another Year by Mike Leigh, this little story, with simple characters and small dialogue, begs this question.  "...Some people seem to have an inexhaustible, even superabundant supply of happiness, while others seem unable to acquire even the smallest portion?  Can happiness be borrowed, stolen or inherited?  Is it earned by meritorious works or granted by the obscure operations of grace"? A.O. Scott of the NY Times begs this rhetorical question.


It can also be likened to twins or siblings raised by the same parents, one exhibits an ease through life without drama or incident while the other is oppositional, finds something wrong in everything they do.  Where do we all come from?  Where do we all belong? to paraphrase Paul McCartney.  

According to Richard Davidson, a professor of psychology and psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin,  happiness is a combination of positive emotional states. It’s associated with being fully engaged and actively embracing the world.  Now for the 64 thousand dollar question...and why isn't everyone engaged in life and embracing it?  It is a complex questions peppered with irony.  There are studies being done with MRI mapping and EEG findings that show the electrical activity of neuronal circuits and how stress and thoughts, experiences and references impact one's ability to be happy.


Happiness 

is not just a vague feeling, but a physical state of the brain. More importantly, this physical state can be induced deliberately.  Is it a matter of choice?  This will be debated to the end of time but just knowing that we have the ability to shift this belief into positive experience.  Embracing this idea and with repeated behaviors or thoughts the synapses fire in a way and thoughts change.  Sandy Banks

in her recent LA Times column wrote about her mother Rene who lived her life as if a recipe.   She took the ingredients that she had and worked with them rather than dismissing an experience because it wasn't perfect or didn't meet her expectations.  Life doesn't always hand us the perfect ingredients, she said.  Some recipes are building from what you already have rather than what's missing; and there is irony in that.  We all have the right ingredients, we just have to find them.  The injustice to being happy is that it is color blind.  It matters none which side of the tracks we were born.  Its a matter of how are we going to get on the happiness train rather than the one that slows down and goes nowhere.  Maintaining a sense of justice serves as a cog in the soul’s primary function of leading a happy life.