Commentary—

The Pursuit Of Happiness

By Curtiss Clark

It happens to everyone. In the middle of a long workday, your mind punches the time clock and heads home without you.

In my case, it is usually 3 or 3:30 in the afternoon. Somewhere between “Open” and “Save As” in a Microsoft Word™ document, my train of thought veers from yet another press release to my sun-dappled yard where the beds and borders need weeding and the cat feigns sleep beneath the yews in the fateful moments before a mole’s sudden death. In such moments, real life leaks from the present moment into the timeless territory of the imagination — until the phone rings. Then it’s back to work.

Fast forward to the weekend, when I actually am in the yard pulling weeds. The temperature is perfect. The bugs are hiding from the swallows. And there’s a big pitcher of iced tea 50 paces away in the refrigerator. The moment is idyllic. But where is my mind? Back in the office, of course.

It is my curse as a cautious person to always be leaping ahead in my mind to anticipate possible problems, whether it is a misattributed quotation at work or mice munching the wiring at home. The irony is that all this caution doesn’t buy any relief from life’s bumps and bruises. Invariably, the things you worry about never come to pass; they only occupy your mind enabling something else — something quite unexpected —to blindside you.

Worry, for me, is a perverse and inverse exercise of that ultimate inalienable right: the pursuit of happiness. If happiness is the absence of calamity, upset, and discomfort, anticipatory worry can seem like a reasonable path to that ideal state. As it turns out, however, happiness and haplessness share a common trait: they are mostly illusory emotional states. They aren’t what they’re cracked up to be — in our minds, at least.

Last fall, Jon Gertner reported on “The Futile Pursuit of Happiness” in The New York Times Magazine. He interviewed psychologists and economists at Harvard, the University of Virginia, Carnegie-Mellon, and Princeton who had researched emotional and behavioral prediction. They wanted to see whether the things people believed would make them happy actually did make them happy, and conversely, whether the things that people dreaded the most were all that bad when they actually did occur. What they found was that the most desired things fell short of bringing people lasting happiness, and the most dreaded things fell short of bringing people lasting misery. The absolute thrill of the new BMW eventually wore off as did the absolute despair of losing a job.

The researchers concluded, according to Mr Gertner, “we overestimate the intensity and the duration of our emotional reactions … to future events.”

So it happens that trimming the hedge, the dreaded chore, can be quite a pleasant experience once you’re up to your elbows in it, which is where I found myself last weekend as I once again tried to coerce a row of hemlocks in front of my house into behaving more like a hedge than the trees they are. Plunging headlong into the thicket to find and hew the source branches of the green spires that were ruining the line of the hedge was like diving into a nest of childhood camp memories. The pruned branches and crushed needles released the intoxicating scent of evergreens. Add the scent of a musty canvas tent, and I could have been 12 years old again.

Actually, I nearly did dive into a nest — of hatchling robins. Jostling my way into cutting range of a three-branch crotch at the heart of the hedge, I spotted the nest and its occupants just in time, caught in those fateful moments before sudden death. I had jarred their protected perch, and the little grass cup that held them was still swaying. The movement triggered the only reaction with any use for them so far in this strange world outside the shell. They stretched their tiny throats straight up and opened their beaks as wide as they could. Their heavy heads lagged behind the curving momentum of their little spindle-necks, like submarine sea grass in the undulating tide of the hedge I had set swaying.

They were so new that their eyes were still shut tight, still operating on blind faith that every sudden movement in this world would bring them a meal. I was their first disappointment.

This encounter with the robins in the hedge abruptly interrupted the imagined office scenario that was unfolding in my head, opening my eyes to my own blind anticipation of something that wasn’t going to happen. Why was I off somewhere in my own thoughts pursuing some overestimated happiness in my own perverse way when the middle of this particular hedge was turning out to be a pretty happy place here and now?

With the hedge trimming suspended until its occupants fledge, I resolved to attend to and appreciate the rest of my sun-dappled yard while I was actually in it. I knew it wouldn’t last, but it was nice for a change to spend a little time in the present on a fine June day.

Sometimes the only thing keeping us from the happiness we seek is the relentless pursuit of happiness itself.