Can we maintain a steady under glow of happiness?

Happiness—­happiness sufficient to make life well worth living is, for most men at least, at most times, a real possibility.  To be won it has but to be sought vigorously enough.  It is to be sought, however, not primarily by changing one’s environment but by changing one’s self; not by acquiring new things, but by acquiring a new attitude toward things; not by getting what could make one happy, but by learning to be happy with what one can get.  The kingdom of heaven is within you!  This is not merely a moralist’s theory, or an empirical observation; it is a scientific fact.  We may restate the matter in psychological language by saying that happiness and unhappiness are responses of the organism to its environment, reactions upon a stimulus, our attitude of welcome or dissatisfaction toward the various matters of our experience.  True, we often think of the quality of pleasantness as inhering in the things we enjoy, and speak of troubles and sorrows as objective.  But this is only a shorthand way of describing experience.  In reality the pleasure we feel in eating when we are hungry or in seeing a friend we love is something added to and different from the taste sensations, or the complex visual perceptions and memory images the friend arouses in us.  So a cutting or burning sensation, the thought of a friend’s death, or of our failure, on the one hand, and our unhappiness thereat on the other hand, are two distinct things, closely bound together in our minds but separable.

The separation is, indeed, difficult to bring about, because the age long struggle for existence has made unhappiness at physical pain and pleasure at the healthy exercise of our organs or satisfying of our appetite instinctive and immediate, that we may avoid what is harmful to life and pursue what is useful.  All our cravings and longings and regrets have this biological value; they are the machinery by which nature spurs us on to better adjustment to the conditions of life.  And in learning to do without the spur we must learn not to need it.  Discontent is better than laziness, remorse better than callous selfishness, suffering under extreme cold better than recklessly exposing the body till it is weakened.  But as soon as we have reached that stage of rationality where we can choose the better way and stick to it without the stinging goad of pain, the pain is no longer necessary and we may safely learn to weed it out.

A few blessed souls we know who have learned the secret, who go about with perpetually radiant face and take smilingly the very mishaps that worry and sadden the rest of us.  To some extent this may be merely a matter of better nerves, of less sensitive temperament, of more abounding vitality; but there are many of the weakest and most sensitive among those who have learned that better way; they can turn everything into happiness as Midas turned everything into gold.