Happy

Everyone wants to be happy.  There are even happiness coaches these days.
Most folk are happy when it is Friday, or when holidays come up, or when their team wins, or when any one of a multitude of things occur.
Like everyone I want to be happy, but I have a problem.  It seems to me happy is an emotion.  It is totally legitimate, but to me it is one of many emotions.  Wikipedia refers to emotions as responses to internal and external events.  We can be happy, sad, frustrated, angry, confident, bored etc.  Happiness it seems to me, is not always appropriate.  For example, when tragedy befalls a friend or loved one.  Our response is not necessarily one of laughter and merriment.  Tears may even be appropriate.
Someone once said, using an old English word we don’t use now that, “happiness depends on happenstance.”  That seems right to me.
I have a real problem with deferring happiness.  It is characterized by statements staring with “I’ll be happy when” this or that occurs.  To me it is important to be happy now.  I guess it is the whole journey thing.    The goal for me is to be happy both now (if it is appropriate) and when I arrive.
Having said that, sometimes the process does not produce happiness in itself, but the end product does.
It seems the words happy and content, are fairly interchangeable.  Mankind’s goal seems to be to create an environment where there is an absence of conflict.  As someone put it to me “all the stars were aligned.”  The trouble is, life seems to have a habit of throwing up things seen as undesirable.  They may be good for our character, but they are not something we would choose.
Switchfoot sing a song entitled “happy is a yuppy word.”  I sort of agree with that.  For me, it has to be something deeper than a fleeting emotion.  Thankfully many people exhibit it.  They are out there, but for most we don’t have to define someone as “an angry person” or “an anxious person.”  In a lot of cases people are described as “happy” or “caring” or something positive.
To me, it is one of the reasons why it is important I don’t get “set in my ways.”  Certainly there are things my life is built on that I have proved over the years, but I sure don’t know everything, and I want to continue to learn.  I can be wrong, and sometimes it is only years later I find out what I believed was built on sand.  It is not pleasant, but I can live with that. I could even say, I don’t like the process but I do like the product.