It has been over a year since my daughter was born—a year since I wrote a blog about humility, in which I was sleep-deprived and full of questions that I had no answer for and emotions that I had never felt before. The roller-coaster of being a parent of an infant was wild—so beautiful and so terrifying—that every single day, for months, was an entirely new scary twist on that wild ride. Some people love roller coasters, and thrive on the unknown, but not me: my wife and I were holding onto those handle bars of parenthood, as tight as we could, trying to survive each passing second that felt like hours and sometimes days.
Over the last few months, that roller-coaster of parenthood has calmed down (just a bit!). To be sure, we will always be riding it—and crazy loops have abounded, so to speak—but in recent months, I have had time to catch my breath, reflect, and work on finding that ever-so-challenging balance between trying to enjoy every single precious moment with my beautiful young daughter while trying to pour myself into my students in a career that I have worked so hard to attain while *also* nurturing the relationships with friends and family that make life meaningful. To be sure, this balance has been a struggle that I am still trying to figure out. Yet, feeling overwhelmed with “things to do” is not new—for many of us, it is a constant in modern adulthood, trying to fit too many things in too few hours of the day. My struggle, I am sure, is not too different from yours.
Yet, what has been new to me these past few months in my reflective moments of solitude (when I get them!), is feeling just so overwhelmed… emotionally. In many ways, this has been a transcendent, beautiful year: growing into this new role as a dad and seeing our daughter already become the sweet, kind daughter of our dreams; making new lifelong friends (extraordinary people, you know who you are!) and re-connecting with past ones; being reappointed as a professor (and nearly completing my decade-long book project); and so much more bonding with my family, and most of all, just spending time with my wife of five years officially but as my life partner of now fifteen years since we first met. So many of my life goals have been, or in the process of, being fulfilled. I am beyond fortunate.
And yet, despite all of this great fortune, when I am asked the question—"am I happy?”—it should be an easy answer. After all, how could I not be, right?
*****
For those that know me well, I am a pretty “happy” guy, with a positive outlook on life and an optimistic ethos. I am someone who stays pretty even-keeled, a constant idealist but yet also a realist: I usually do not get too high nor do I get too low. But this year that equilibrium that I used to be able to find has completely vanished. All year, I have tried to find my equilibrium, some sort of internal balance and an emotional calmness, but it all has felt like sand just falling through my fingers. I have always felt that part of this equilibrium that I worked to maintain was part of my own quest for happiness. Many years ago, someone once told me that happiness was a state of mind, which is why everyone could achieve it. I have always wondered if that person was right.
Perhaps happiness is like a rainbow: it seems real, and it is, but we can never actually reach it or “grab it.” This has been one of my daughter’s favorite books this past year!
To be sure, I am certainly not the first person to ponder what it means to be happy or achieve happiness in one’s life! It is a very personal question, an equally heavy question, and a question that I have long wanted to write about but never felt like I could. Perhaps it has been being a dad (and after over 12 months now, having that word “dad” finally start to set in!), achieving professional stability as a professor, finishing my book project, or all of these combined—again, life-long dreams that I had hoped for, now achieved—that led to me (perhaps unwisely!) tackle this enduring question of happiness in such a personal way. And what I have realized this year, more than any year before, is that happiness—to me at least—is not a state a mind: an achievable “goal” that I can satisfy or just simply reach and hold onto. It is not a grabable “thing,” but a catch-all term, a rhetorical umbrella, for all the feelings and experiences that make up our lives. I have long lived by the adage that to feel the most intense joy, we must also feel the intense heartache; it is surviving and feeling in our soul the lowest of lows, that hardship (or, for those fortunate to experience little hardship, sincerely empathizing with the struggles of others), that then allows us to recognize and so deeply revel in the most euphoric life moments. (I have always said that doing so is engaging in the beauty that epitomizes what it means to be human.) The accomplishments (and relationships) that allow us to bring the most genuine satisfaction can only happen because real hard work and sacrifice occurred first. As my wise grandfather once said, “if it was easy to achieve something great, everybody would do it.”
It is through remembering all of this that I realize why my search for happiness, in recent months, has seemingly come up blank. As I mentioned above, happiness—to me—is not a continual state of mind that can be achieved on its own: life is much too unpredictable, too complex, too ever-changing. Instead, we—or at least, I—have to have seek out moments of contentment. I think stringing these moments together and finding these moments bring us closer to whatever one believes happiness to be. I realize this year, with all its ups and downs, is that it is not about trying to arbitrarily “be” happy or to “find” happiness—Fool’s Gold, a façade that leads to frustration and discontentment—but about connecting together these genuine moments of contentment, like links in our chain of life.
It is these moments of contentment that my busy, overloaded mind is most still, where I am most present. In other words, moment that make me feel, well, happy. For example, when I am engaging in laughter with a cherished friend, I feel deeply content. When I am cuddling on the couch with my lovely wife, I do, too. When I feel satisfied after a long day of work—even if tired!—that satisfaction makes me feel deeply content. When I exercise, I feel energized, a different type of contentment, the body’s natural adrenaline pacing through my veins. When I experience joy or nostalgia or a buzzing curiosity, all of these feelings lead to moments of contentment. Above all, to feel genuine gratitude—according to science!—leads us to have the deepest moments of contentment. Think about the times when you feel deeply grateful, and how wonderful that made you feel. To have real gratitude for another individual boosts serotonin levels and positively affects our brain: there is magic to feeling gratitude for someone else that speaks to the magic of having meaningful social interactions.
To connect this all back to being a father, having a child has made me look forward in my life and ponder the future a lot more than I ever have prior—at least with more precision. Life seems more finite; maybe that is just because I am getting older, too, but participating in that circle of life—seeing my daughter grow—has certainly been humbling. I would like to think parenthood humbles everyone. I see the road ahead of me, all the moments that I hope I get to have, and realize that to find happiness involves not searching for it at all. Instead, I must open myself up to all the people around me, cultivate relationships with loved ones, and through these relationships—and the experiences we go on together, both special but particularly the everyday—participate in love, laughter, and joy. I want to create as many moments of contentment, real genuine contentment that makes you smile deep in your heart, by participating in the types of feelings that we know provide that contentment: giving and receiving kindness (my favorite life experience for those who know me!), engaging in gratitude, experiencing laughter and then more laughter, and most of all, loving your friends and family and then feeling that love in return.
This is not to say that engaging in these moments of contentment are easy. They are not. Among what seems to be a continuous stream of horrifying events and news all around us—both abroad and in our country—it can be hard to not only avoid absorbing so much toxicity, but to stay present in the “everyday.” I certainly feel that way at times. Plus, to have a child also means to care about the future, and the future can seem perilous—and I do not want to understate any of this. It can also, as it does for me, feel overwhelming to think about the enormous problems that lie ahead and the suffering of so many fellow humans. It can feel, to put it simply, paralyzing.
But, this is all the more reason to dive into—for me—all of life’s “small” moments. It’s funny: 12 years ago, in my early 20s, I wrote my very first blog, entitled “Cherish the Little Moments.” It was a short, if overly melancholy, call-to-action to focus on life’s little precious moments because those are the ones that matter. Over a decade later, I think that’s still right—these little moments lead to the type of deeper moments of contentment that can then lead to happiness. But, what I did not yet understand at that moment in my young (childless!) life was the overall arc of these moments: why they matter to life’s bigger picture, to our own painted portrait that we add to each year that we exist on this beautiful Earth. When I look at my daughter, I realize now that it is the work of purposely repeating and creating these moments, one day, one moment, at a time—and not searching for the perfect “happiness” recipe—that is actually what it perhaps feels like, I think, to “be happy.”
*****
So, yes, I am happy—but not because I “feel” happy all the time or do not feel moments of despair, sadness, or self-doubt. I can assure you, that is not the case. But, I think I am happy—and being a dad has helped me realize this—because I am not searching as much for what it means to “be” happy or to possess a certain feeling of happiness. The idea that happiness is consistently being in a certain state of mind where we do not worry about things and all is well, all the time, is not really how we as humans experience life. I do not know what happiness “looks like.” But what I do know with certainty is that what we can—and must—experience is joy, and that joy then manifests in our own moments of uplift. In other words, I have realized now that it is not what I do that makes me “happy,” but the feeling I get from what I do, that makes me “happy.” And, no better example of this is of a toddler: one minute, my daughter is laughing uncontrollably, grinning and giggling ear to ear, and literally the next second, she is crying uncontrollably and jerking her body all over the place. She is not “happy” (or “unhappy”)—there is no constant equilibrium here—but based on what she was doing at any given moment, those activities made her feel a certain way: playing peek-a-boo in her playpen brought her the deepest sense of joy and contentment, picking her up to take her to the diaper changing table brought her the deepest sense of frustration and irritation. That organic innocence to feel first and think later (if at all at this young age!) is perhaps humans living in our most raw, even primal, state. Should we learn from such examples?
Coming full circle, I suspect that I will always be searching for my equilibrium and life balance, in that, feeling overwhelmed emotionally with all the constant changes of life will never go away. Nor should it. It is, again, what makes us human. For me, to overthink and rationalize every emotion and try to derive meaning from every activity is wired into my brain (and my heart). But, I can do better to more explicitly seek out moments of contentment, and have these moments and, mostly, the feelings I get from them guide my life—not the other way around through an endless search for a state of happiness. It’s a wonderful sentiment, but life is too complex, too unknowable, too beautiful and too terrifying all at the same time to rationalize something so encompassing as happiness. What I have learned this year in trying to “find” happiness—unsuccessfully—within this new normal of parenthood, is, well, to stop searching for it. If going through the wild ride of parenting this first year has taught me anything, it’s that I must instead search for and constantly engage in more moments of contentment: to seek out people who bring meaning to my life and create love in my hearts. If I can do that, I know, then, that I will be as happy as a person can get.
