In thinking about happiness, we begin by paraphrasing writings included in the works of the Taoist thinker Zhuangzi:
Zhuangzi and Huizi were walking together above the dam on the Hao River and Zhuangzi said, “See how the little thryssa swim forth so free and easy! This is the happiness of fishes!”
Huizi responded, “You are not a fish. How do you know what the happiness of fishes is?”
Zhuangzi answered, “You aren’t me. How do you know what I know?”
“If by not knowing you, I can’t know what you know, then you, not being a fish, also can’t know what they know,” said Huizi.
“Let’s return to your original question,” said Zhuangzi. “In our pleasant walk here on the Hao, you asked me how I knew what the happiness of fishes was. You already knew that I knew, and you asked me.”
–from the Autumn Floods section of the Zhuangzi (莊子)
More in this than clever play with the ball of extended semantics. Much like Hamlet’s “nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so”, we almost picture the two friends, Huizi and Zhuangzi, out for a pleasant stroll above the rushing river, small silver fish making glittering patterns beneath the dam. Joy, participatory, darts everywhere. It flashes not just beneath the water, but beneath the playful dialogue of the two friends, in their cleverness and the love that only manifests in such types of play. Happiness seems multitudinously manifest on that lost day, preserved only in this dialogue between friends purported to have been recorded perhaps some 2400 years ago.
Yet, that nugget of truth. Happiness. Infectious. Promiscuous. Participatory. When we feel happy, days seem to respond. Our lives respond. Ella Wheeler Wilcox wrote:
Laugh, and the world laughs with you;
Weep, and you weep alone;
For the sad old earth must borrow its mirth,
But has trouble enough of its own.
Sing, and the hills will answer;
Sigh, it is lost on the air;
The echoes bound to a joyful sound,
But shrink from voicing care.
–from Solitude
We all know this though. Good days. Bad days. They drift on with each kind of day feeding others of its kind. Multiplying. Prufrock’s crushing lament smacks of the self fulfilling prophecy:
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
I do not think that they will sing to me.
— from T.S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
No. They will not. The point that the quality of our course depends on our psychological, or more importantly–more essentially–our emotional terrain remains clear. The mermaids will not sing to Prufrock not because he is aging. Not even because he is unsure. More because he not only voices an inner despair, but also inhabits it while the world rushes past him.
In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.
Similarly, in As You Like It, Jacques, seeing a wounded stag, stands upon the bank, “weeping into the needless stream”, lamenting the stag “being there alone,/Left and abandon’d of his velvet friends”.
Weep and you weep alone.
Perhaps the key to avoiding disaster, if there is one, is to participate, as much as possible, in the joyous. Or at least the mildly pleased. The content. The small smile of the zazen practitioner. When displeased, put a half smile on your lips so that the inner terrain begins to change again–moving again towards light and success. The emotional landscape becomes (even if just a little) easier to deal with, easier to navigate. The looming rocks recede and a few sunbeams make it through that thin patch in the clouds.
Soon, we stand again amongst the dawn chorus of the birds, assembling for the conference that Farid ud-Din Attar describes, where, after a long search for their king, the birds discover that their king is themselves. We stand upon the dam watching little fishes, swimming forth and flashing silver. We hear cool water and we sense the smile of friends, even if we cannot see them. This is where we want to live, in the gentle side of the turning days. The breeze across the sea, and the fog nestled into those hollows where it serves as a sometime blanket for the sleeping moon.
It seems like a cliché, but we can get there, and we don’t need a course to tell us how. Just give yourself five minutes. Stop, and really give yourself that little bit of time. Then close your eyes. Breathe. Pay attention to the breath. Just count each breath, but don’t let it matter what the number is. Should you think of laundry, groceries, or bills, start the count again at one. Should you get to ten, then start again at one. Just breathe. Half smile. Soon you find yourself amongst the fishes in the stream, scalloping the sky with birds, rolling with the sea, or sleeping or rising with the moon. Your mind’s eye can see everything, so you can too. Be there, in those places, or any other places where you might find peace, for just five minutes. Then see how the day goes after that.
This week sees Independence Day in the United States. Whether celebrating raucously, outrageously, obscenely and courageously, or quietly, I wish you well. I urge you to keep breathing, and just stop and pay attention to that process once in a while. Then see what happens. Have a great week.
