Last post, I defined happiness as the emotion that springs from good happenings at good pace. When good things happen, we’re happy. And when these good things happen at a good pace, we live a happy life.
Let’s go deeper. We can only make good things happen if we have the power and freedom to control our lives. We have a fundamental need for control.
“People find it gratifying to exercise control,” says Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert in his book, Stumbling on Happiness, “Being effective – changing things, influencing things, making things happen – is one of the fundamental needs with which human brains seem to be naturally endowed, and much of our behavior from infancy onward is simply an expression of this penchant for control. Before our butts hit the very first diaper, we already have a throbbing desire to suck, sleep, poop, and make things happen. It takes us a while to get around to fulfilling the last of these desires only because it takes us a while to figure out that we have fingers, but when we do, look out world. Toddlers squeal with delight when they knock over a stack of blocks, push a ball, or squash a cupcake on their foreheads. Why? Because they did it, that’s why. Look, Mom, my hand made that happen. The room is different because I was in it. I thought about falling blocks, and poof, they fell. Oh boy! Sheer doing!”
With Gilbert’s quote in mind, I see happiness as I see a tree. Control is the trunk. Good happenings at good pace are the branches that grow out of the trunk. And happiness is the fruit and flowers that grow out of the branches. In the same way the trunk builds branches that build flowers and fruit, control builds good happenings which create the emotion of happiness.
If we work down our Tree of Happiness from top to bottom, we can say that happiness is our natural emotional response to good happenings at good pace. And then we say that we make good happenings when we have control over our lives.
Freedom and power, used rightly, lead to good things, which in turn, lead to a happy, flourishing life.
