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Dear Natural Health Solutions Reader,

“If you observe a really happy man, you will find him building a boat, writing a symphony, educating his son, growing double dahlias in his garden, or looking for dinosaur eggs in the Gobi desert. He will not be searching for happiness as if it were a collar button that has rolled under the radiator.”

So wrote W. Beran Wolfe, MD (1900-35), an Austrian psychiatrist and author, in his provocatively titled book How to be Happy Though Human. He no doubt would have written many other profound things had he not died at age 35 in an unspecified accident.

(Unfortunately, Wolfe is a rather obscure historical figure, so I can find no record of precisely what kind of mishap caused his untimely demise — but I hope it happened as he took part in the kind of happy-making activity he describes.)

In any case, he definitely had a point. Happiness can’t be hunted, snared, and wrestled to the tundra like prey. In fact, the attempt to do so is likely to breed misery. After all, while pursuing happiness, you by definition don’t possess it, and knowing this only deepens your distress.

And yet…

Wolfe’s observation suggests that happiness can be gently invited into one’s life as a side effect of taking part in some engaging pursuit.

So the real key to happiness is an engaging pursuit.

How do you identify one?

The answer, as Croatian-American psychologist and happiness researcher Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi stated in his indispensable Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, is summarized by the terms difficult and worthwhile.

As he put it:

“Contrary to what we usually believe… the best moments of our lives are not the passive, receptive, relaxing times… The best moments of our lives usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to the limits in a voluntary moment to achieve something difficult and worthwhile. Optimal experience is, thus, something we make happen… For each person, there are thousands of opportunities, challenges to expand ourselves.”

Csikszentmihalyi, a professor at California’s Claremont Graduate University who remains happy and hearty at age 80, spent decades interviewing people from all walks of life about the moments in which they felt happiest. He popularized the term “flow” because his subjects spontaneously used it to describe this desirable state.

His research makes it clear — it is possible to consciously bring more flow, via engaging pursuits, into one’s life.

So why are so many of us so miserable in the modern world?

The answer is twofold.

First, as Csikszentmihalyi points out, we imagine that exertion — physical, mental, or both — and happiness are incompatible, yet they are actually so tightly linked as to be virtually identical. The “flow” state happens in the throes of intense, self-forgetting concentration — the kind that happens only when performing some challenging task.

Second, Wolfe’s and Csikszentmihalyi’s writings suggest that when it comes to our occupations, most of us have saddled ourselves with just half — the worst half — of the difficult-and-worthwhile happiness mandate.

Consider — there is no shortage of difficult tasks in a typical contemporary workday:

  • The 90-minute commute through glacial traffic
  • The morning “stand-up” meeting in which impossible — excuse me, “stretch” — goals are blithely dispensed
  • The endless middle-manager drama of managing both “up” and “down” the organizational chart.

Yet is any of this worthwhile?

You can draw your own conclusions, but it’s clear to me that as essential tasks such as growing food or building shelter fall to an economic underclass of “service workers,” skilled managers find themselves increasingly conscripted to do ultimately pointless tasks for enterprises that create ultimately pointless products.

So…

I won’t conclude by daring to parse the worthwhile from the worthless for you. You certainly don’t have to be a farmer or carpenter. An essential occupation to you may be superfluous to me, and vice versa.

I will only say that a great deal of research makes it clear: Feeling that one’s daily toil is worthless gnaws at felicity like almost nothing else can.

Conversely, that same research confirms that doing what you know, deep in your soul, needs doing is the bedrock upon which happiness flourishes.

If you are not doing such work, be bold in your determination to find it.

Then do it.

Only then, at odd moments during the crowded hours, will you notice – almost as an afterthought — that your gentle invitation for a visit from happiness has been accepted.

Sincerely,

Brad Lemley

Brad Lemley
Editor, Natural Health Solutions

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