The fine art of finding happiness

In three out of five conversations I have with my mother, there is the inevitable check-in. Despite how busy I might be professionally and socially, she wants to know how I’m “really” doing. And at some point in these conversations, I hear the deep concern and love in her voice when she says to me, “I just want you to be happy.” I shamefully admit that my response, for the most part, is a barely concealed sigh of impatience. In my own mind, I’m thinking, “Happy? There’s so much I want to accomplish — who has time to think about happy?”

But I have been thinking about it lately, especially in regard to that question from my mother, the one human on earth who loves me more than I even know how to love myself. My mother has never once said to me, “I just want you to be rich” or “I just want you to be famous” or “I just want you to have whatever you want.” Things the world tries to convince us are the highest aims.

But “happy” is such an interesting word, because in today’s world, many of us are trained to have the same eye-rolling response to it. Unlike the ancient philosophers who connected the idea to ethics and virtue and the pursuit of the highest communal good, today I’d guess that many of us see happiness as a childish or indulgent goal for those who aren’t serious about life and responsibilities and achievements and justice.

Yet I also think it’s a word that’s worth swimming around in a little more, to consider what else it could mean beyond our usually trite associations. So I picked up the phone recently and called my mother, and I asked her flat out, “Mom, you know how you always tell me you just want me to be happy? What does that mean to you?” And without skipping a beat, my beautiful mother said to me, “It means that wherever you are and whatever you are doing, that you would be at peace with yourself.”

I was so moved that I almost teared up. It wasn’t the response I was expecting. But when I hung up and thought about what she’d said, peace felt like a good place from which to start reflecting on this idea of happiness.

There is a beautiful early 20th-century painting by William Arthur Chase called “The Keynote”. It simply shows a young woman in a blue dress sitting at a black piano with her back to us. She is leaning to the left, away from the piano, one hand behind her grasping the corner of the stool. But her other hand is stretched out over the piano, two fingers tapping the keys, perhaps tentatively, perhaps daringly. What I love about this painting is what her posture evokes: this sense of a young woman alone, unaware of our gaze, sneaking off to try her hand at something she’s drawn to, or compelled by. There is a note of hesitancy, but more out of caution than reluctance, as though someone might soon arrive to send her off to do what she’s “supposed” to be doing.

It may seem an odd image to use as a reflection on happiness. But I think a significant aspect of human happiness stems from the pursuit of the things that compel us, that stir us to express something of ourselves. Given the prerequisite of having all other basic human needs met, I believe it’s in our nature to be makers of all manner of things, to want to create, to put a piece of ourselves back into the world. And when we have the room and the courage and the encouragement to follow that creative spirit, it is a way towards being at peace with ourselves, being settled in the innermost part of ourselves.

Yet in contemplating a pursuit of happiness I cannot help but also think of our human need for one another. I am so moved by “10am Is When You Come to Me”, a series of watercolour and pencil sketches by Louise Bourgeois. Throughout her career, Bourgeois probed questions of belonging, intimacy, family, sexuality and the body, of the unconscious and interiority, and in 2006 she created 20 sketches on musical score paper of her hands and those of her assistant and friend Jerry Gorovoy. He worked with Bourgeois for more than 30 years, and 10am was the time he would arrive each day to meet her.

The paintings are done in shades of red and pink, the colour red for Bourgeois representing the intensity of feeling. The hands relate to one another in different configurations, one grasping the other, reaching across for one another, linking fingers. The score paper to me suggests the rhythm of daily life. Bourgeois described her relationship with Gorovoy thus: “When you are at the bottom of the well, you look around and say, who is going to get me out? In this case, it is Jerry who comes and he presents a rope, and I hook myself on the rope and he pulls me out.”

The language of happiness in our world is often future-oriented — ‘I’ll be happy when . . . ’

As commonplace as companionship might be to many of us, it still remains a world-altering thing to experience another person’s consistent, trusted and supportive presence. I think sometimes we lose sight of how much other people contribute to our sense of wellbeing and our ability to move through the world with our burdens somewhat alleviated. The language of happiness in our world is often future-oriented — “I’ll be happy when . . .” — whereas these beautiful sketches remind me that elation is not always a fountain of emotion. Sometimes deep happiness is a quiet stream running softly in our daily lives, a flow of existence that stabilises us so that so much else can be accomplished.

Wassily Kandinsky believed that art could be a language for our inner life. The Russian pioneer of abstraction understood his art as a form of spiritual practice, and seemed more interested in what his work evoked in people than what decipherable images could be made out. He was heavily influenced by classical scores and integrated his appreciation for music into his art in a variety of ways.

His 1913 piece “Composition VII”, with its array of vibrant colour, varied shapes and seemingly arbitrary lines, all of which appear chaotic yet hold together beautifully, reminds me more of jazz than anything else. Art historians suggest that this is a work about biblical themes of resurrection, Judgment Day, the Flood and the Garden of Eden, with all the attendant ideas of death, destruction, renewal, rebirth, choice, grace, vulnerability and survival.

From the overlap of these themes, we see a work throbbing with vibrancy and beauty. Sometimes we must tease out happiness from whatever life gives us. Our lives, like the painting, are replete with themes of death and renewal. And yet Kandinsky creates a gorgeous image from these themes.

Can’t our lives be similar, where we compose strands, lines, of happiness from all we are in the midst of? I’m trying to figure this out myself as I go along, but I’m thinking through these things aloud with you, because despite everything we weather and persevere in, there are some things I want for all of us. Like my mother, I want us to be happy.

Email Enuma at [email protected]

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