What's the End Game?

Sometimes I wanna track down whoever invented the term 'happy', and shoot them. While I'm doing pretty well at the moment, I too have had some pretty low points in the past few years and I wonder whether 'happiness' exists. I think that it's possible to feel moments of happiness, but I don't think anyone is ever going to be truly happy. Thankful, yes. Grateful, yes. But completely happy? Things would have to perfect for that to happen. And we all know that nothing is perfect. Feeling better now?! Didn't mean to get all melancholy/pessimistic on you. Although...if happiness doesn't exist, then we're not missing out on anything at all now, are we?!

hmm. I think there is a big difference between trying to be happy all the time and trying to squeeze as much joy as possible out of life. I would say it isn't realistic to be happy all the time and I wouldn't want to if it meant having to forget people I love who are no longer here or things like that. Sadness is a fact of life and probably the longer we live the more there is to be sad about. To me that means I have to celebrate all the good things even more, not as a way of pretending sadness doesn't exist, but because it does exist. I don't know if I'm making sense but denial = bad and thinking and writing the way you are about how you feel = good IMHO :).

i think i want you two to be my spiritual advisers, does that work for you? :) you both have such good perspectives on life. i tell you, i try to think through things but sometimes my head gets so far up my own behind that i can't see the whole picture. because both of you are right about so many things. promise me that if i start to wallow again that you will slap me upside the head and tell me to snap out of it! in a kind and loving way, of course, while still acknowledging my need to feel like shit. :)

Maybe it's a good thing that I'm sort of ADD and that I'm fine with living in the moment. Greer seems to have hit the nail on the head with her squeezing as much joy as you can out of every day. That is what I do, but I've never put it into words or given it much thought.

This has been a very hard year for me so far, with my own health problems and my father's death. Even on the toughest days, I have found joy in something, even if it's been something like opening a freaking jar without help. ;)

Squeeze the joy, learn from the darkness. And play scrabulous, even if you know you're going to take a beating.

Hugs.

Yeah, Greer's comment is lovely. Being happy is all well and good but finding things that help you get by is achievable, I think, even if happiness sometimes just isn't. I used to think, way back when, that that was a key to the closest of close relationships - 'we help each other get by' - now I feel like I'm reclaiming that key for myself and, looking back at that last post, often it's all about finding something to give, with no thought at all as to how it might be received. 'We must always do the right thing, and not bother ourselves about what is practical or possible, becuase if we don't do the right thing we'll be doing the wrong thing, and then we'll be a part of the problem and not a part of the solution.' Of course we could just come back down to earth by remembering that 'there is always somebody worse off than yourself, but wouldn't it be nice if you could see them from time to time, just so you could have a laugh'.

I think that Adam is so right, both here and in what he said in the previous post, about doing kind things for others and helping out where we can. This is something I need to improve upon in my own life and so I take both those quotes very much to heart. It was reinforced for me today, I won't bore you with the whole story but someone did something so kind for me that cried for 20 minutes and I've been welling up all day whenever I think about it :). I need to find ways to be as kind to others and so I'm glad you brought this all up and got me thinking about it!

Hey, Marcy, my friend, I apologize that I haven't visited you in a while.

As someone who has struggled with life-long depression, I can tell you that cognitive therapy does work. It's not the same as pushing the dark thoughts away. It is retraining your focus to dwell on the positive things in life and frame the negative ones less overwhelmingly.

If something really bad has happened, I do think it's important to feel it fully, not sweep it under the carpet. The deaths of our loved ones, for example. At the time I made a 90-minute tape of songs relating to death and loss. I listened to that thing so many times and cried and cried until I was ready to stop.

But for pure self-preservation, I also took breaks from my sorrow. At first for only a few seconds I focused on some little thing happening in the present that was enjoyable. During that time I did not think about the past or future, only the Now. Have you read Eckhart Tolle's The Power of Now? That was really influential on my thinking.

Still for a while I thought that basically my life was like a coffin, with me still breathing in it, until one day I realized that I had years ahead of me to live and that many possibilities were open. It was my CHOICE to be happy or sad in those years.

Gradually I lengthened those periods of staying in the Now. I focused less and less on the sad past and the worrisome future. Thinking this way did become a habit that gradually replaced the depressive thoughts.

This combined with my finding a spiritual foundation that worked for me turned me finally into the happier person I always wanted to be. Not a Pollyanna, but a content person who thinks life is good and is less afraid and pretty mellow in most situations.

Lotsa hugs to you. Shoot, I owe you some photos, I just remembered. Check your mail. :)

nat--well, it's good to know ADD is good for something! i'm just kidding. i think you have a great attitude. sometimes i think all the shit just catches up to me and for whatever reason--the depression probably being the main one--i can't seem to focus on the now or see the joy and i can only seem to see the crap. i have a really bad habit of feeling sorry for myself.

adam--i can't remember if i've said this before, but one of the best things about working where i work is that is actually gives me an opportunity to give. that's one of the main reasons i enjoy working there so much. i cannot focus on myself while i'm there, it's just impossible, and therefore i feel so much better. i need to remember to be that way when i'm not at work as well. because like greer says, you never know when something you do is going to affect someone else in a meaningful way.

greer--i think those are the kinds of things you need to hold on to when life starts to fill with darkness. if you can summon them, that is. there's a line from an ani defranco song, "joyful girl," where she says: the world owes me nothing, and we owe each other the world. i think that means that we do need to take care of each other in a truly giving way, not in a way that expects anything in return. we'd all be so much happier that way. :)

linda--which leads me to your wonderfully wise comments. it's taken me a while to come to terms with my depression, even though i've probably been depressed my whole life. i think i thought that it would eventually go away, and now i see it won't. not completely. but it gives me hope to know that you have had real "success," for lack of a better term," finding ways to be content in this world. that's what i'd like to feel, content. happy in the occasional fleeting moments, but more or less satisfied the rest of the time. i think cognitive therapy is a valid route to take. maybe my main problem is not wanting to let go of the sadness, because i'm not sure what would be there to replace it? hmmmm . . . lots to think about. i will pick up tolle's book, too. very intriguing stuff, all that about being in the now, that the now is all we really have. i think i know these things intellectually, but my heart doesn't always follow. :)

For me, happiness is kind of the thing. Its the reason I sacrifice a lot of things that most grown ups require. But happiness isn't what they sell you in Disney movies and sit-coms. Part of being happy, for me, is the search. It's trudging the road of life sometimes, but finding little gems that put a smile on my face - my son's smile, a great song, whatever. I read a lot of Thomas Moore for a while as well, but at the end of it, I just found him a bit too heavy, too reeeaching. Again, for me, sometimes I just have to get on with it and leave the deep thinking for 4 a.m.

I am not sure, Marcy, if terms like 'happiness' and 'meaning' actually have any sort of meaning whatsoever, if you know what I mean, at least not in the way that people apply them to events and lives and existence and things like that. There is no such thing as finding meaning in events, because events simply take place, they have no meaning.

Events can teach you things, or change you, or have a massive impact on you but the meaning is in how it affects you personally, not in the event itself. There's no point looking for meaning in things, there really isn't, just find the strength to absorb the impact and digest the change and incorporate in into yourself.

Equally, happiness, as a description of a person is just silly. It makes it sound like a state to be achieved, which is daft. Life is not like that. I am one of the happiest people I know in pretty much every sense, but on a day to day basis I get desperately bored, rage with myself about achieving nothing at work (again), filled with brief bouts of disgust at having drunk too much last night (again) and all sorts of other things. Then I crawl into bed next to Kate at the end of the night and we snuggle up and everything is just fine. Happiniess isn't something you can force upon yourself: like any other emotion, it's just something that washes over you from time to time, and you have to notice it and appreciate it when it makes an appearance because you never know when the next one will be. Then when you look back you'll notice the times when it was present more than it was absent and say that you were happy then. It doesn't make one part of you life any better or more successful than any other.

Equally, if you're feeling black it is futile to try and run away from it - you can't magic it away by pretending its not there. But bear in mind that feeling shit doesn't reflect on you personally, it is just a feeling that has gripped you for the time being, not a judgment. As FiL says, you're probably best taking the time to look it in the eye and find out why it's there. You may never succeed, but you'll only make it worse by fretting about it, and sometimes these things really do just go away on their own as you take care of the day to day business of pottering along with your life.

The thing I hate most about having to listen to sweet, kind people feeling shitty is that they always seem to think that their unhappiness is some sort of value-judgment on behalf of the universe. Unhappiness is just chemistry, that's all it is. You can't just stare at it and fix it, because it's fucking complicated. It's extraordinarily rare that people can just stare at their lives, decide what's wrong, fix it and magically achieve serenity the next morning. For most people it's like an engine they don't understand the workings of: all you can do is tweak the things you feed in and eventually you will probably hit on blends that make it run better than usual. It's not unlikely that you won't even know what it is, but for Christ's sake don't sit there thinking stuff is 'your fault'. Bollocks. Just face each little problem, one at a time, and eventually you might well get to the point, not where the big problem is solved exactly, but where it just isn't such a problem anymore.

Too long, sorry.

One more thing, too, in reaction to the title of the post. 'What's the point, the endgame, the answer?' There isn't one, there never was. It's not a competition, it's not a quiz, there is no way to win and no right answer.

That part is for you to decide with the people around you and in relation to your life, your hopes, fears, needs, aspirations and whatever the fuck makes you happy. There isn't a point to life, nor should there need to be one. I don't even think I like the idea of 'your life' in any sort of over-arching sense, as opposed to something more tangible like, say, the process of living. It's a scruffy, messy and frustrating business, but whilst you can change how you live your life if you're determined enough, there are too many outside influences to make it all that reasonable to expect to actually change 'your life' as such. The latter is just an aggregate of various events, not a coherent whole - it's like the weather: too complicated to control easily and although it looks like one single thing, it is just the opposite.

What you can change is how you live your life, and not wasting time on silly questions like whether or not you're doing it 'right' is a very good first step.

And listen to King Creosote's 678. It's a great song: 'I never was going to be 6,7,8 feet tall, but in the back of my mind I was always hoping that I might just get by.'

chris--i'm still working on the moore. i do like what he says about our life's work is creating our soul. it really ties in to what matthew's saying (well, what everyone has said) that life is process, process, process.

and i know that, i really do. it's just that sometimes when you're prone to depression, you start to look inward and you get sucked into yourself and it's very hard to see the big picture, very hard to imagine that things will be ok no matter what happens.

matthew--you make very good, wise points here. i think i used the term "end-game" because i need to think of things in some sort of context, you know? because even though i understand that happiness is really something that washes over you, as you say, or is a moment-by-moment kind of thing that you need to pay attention to and recognize when it happens, i simply have fewer of those moments than i do of the others.

i totally agree with you about events not having meaning in and of themselves, that the only meaning that comes from what happens to you is how it affects you or what you take from it. the thing is, another thing that happens when you're depressed is that you're prone to thinking in terms of, what's the point? why am i here? does anything really matter? they may not be the "right" questions but they're the ones that weigh you down when you're depressed. when you're not feeling as depressed, they don't come into the picture as much and life is much more about the day to day, moment to moment. at least that's been my experience.

the trouble with depression is that it doesn't really make sense. it's kind of evil that way. maybe corrupt is a better word, because your thinking actually gets corrupted, like a file gets corrupted on your computer. part of getting through the darker times is recognizing when your thoughts are starting down that road and trying to stop them before they go too far.

i don't know if anything i've said makes any sense. i've been thinking about it most of the day and have come to realize i don't know much about anything!