What Do You Need to Be Happy?

If you’re happy and you know it, clap your hands.
If you’re happy and you know it, clap your hands.
If you’re happy and you know it,
And you really want to show it,
If you’re happy and you know it, clap your hands.

Do you remember this old round? It was a staple in Sunday School and Bible School. Picture twenty or so children gathered in a circle. The younger ones may not remember or understand the words, but they throw themselves into the actions, clapping their hands, stomping their feet, shouting “Hoo-ray!”, etc.

The slightly older children may know the words and sing them with gusto, but for them, too, the motions are the exciting part.

Then there are the older kids who want to believe that they are too old for such nonsense. Too cool. Too world-weary.

They may not even sing along, or do so only grudgingly, unless they can attach themselves to a younger child and tell themselves that they are helping the younger child out.

Usually, though, they will participate in the actions because that offers them a platform for 1) making noise, 2) hamming it up 3) indulging the sudden realization that, in spite of the angst of growing up, they really are happy.

What about you? Are you happy? Do you know it? If so, how do you show it? Do you “go through the motions” grudgingly or with gusto?

This is not a frivolous question because what most of us want from life is to be happy and to serve some purpose. There are times, too, when our ability to serve some higher purpose is stymied by our perceived lack – I was going to say “our perceived lack of happiness” but I suspect that it is really our perceived lack of (fill in the blank).

Let me give you an example. My sixteen-month old grandson has severe allergies. When we go down to the church parlor after worship for refreshments, there is rarily anything he can have. So I have gotten in the habit of tucking a banana into my purse so Daniel will have something to munch on while his brothers are chowing down on cake or cookies.

(Daniel will probably grow up associating bananas with church and vice-versa. Should he decide to follow his great-grandfather, great-grandmother, grandfather, and grandmother {or his mother, who runs the audio-visual for the service} into the ministry, he will probably experience an overwhelming urge to eat a banana after each sermon.)

Anyway, Last Sunday, I had found some gluten-free, egg-free cookies; after Daniel finished stuffing the banana into his mouth, I gave him a cookie. Josh, age six, finished his large slice of ooey-gooey chocolate cake and asked, “Can I have one of Daniel’s cookies?”

“No,” I told him. “The cookies are for Daniel. You just had a piece of cake.”

Immediately, Josh experienced the lack of a cookie. His lower lip came out in a pout. Fortunately, Josh is young enough to know how happy he is and the incident was soon forgotten.

But we adults have spent most of our lives working hard to insure that we have no lack of things in our lives. Unfortunately, this often leads to the illusion that it is things that make us happy. Or worse, we defer our sense of happiness because we think that if we only had (fill in the blank), then we could be truly happy.

The problem with that mindset is that when we get (fill in the blank), we find we’re still not happy. We decide we need a bigger and better (fill in the blank) or something else altogether. That’s like Josh who thought that having a big piece of chocolate cake could make him happy, only to decide that he needed a cookie, too.

The tragedy lies not in the fact that Josh didn’t get a cookie or that I haven’t yet gotten a million dollars, a new car, a cottage on a beach and a sailboat. The real tragedy lies in the fact that we let our fear of lack destroy our awareness of happiness. Many of us have simply forgotten how to be happy. Or we’ve forgotten what happiness feels like.

Abraham Lincoln, who certainly had cause for melancholy, said that most people are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.

Are you happy?