Happiness is Our Reset Mode

I’ve been watching my family and friends navigate their way through some very difficult problems. This is new for me because, like most people, I’m generally too busy slogging through my own knee deep mud to observe other people doing it. But right now I seem to be floating in a rare eye of the storm where calmness prevails and you hold your breath wishing it could last forever. It’s given me a bird’s eye view.


What I’ve noticed is that we just aren’t built to be unhappy. It’s a shocking observation I realize, but still true. When I watch someone handling a particularly stressful or heart wrenching problem like a foreclosure or a divorce, they dwell in a dark place for a while. At the beginning the problem looms so large that it’s the elephant in the room that won’t shut up, demands all your time, and keeps waking you up in the middle of the night but that changes. After about two months—and long before they’ve reached a conclusion they just can’t be unhappy anymore—at least not all of the time. They begin to laugh again, they visibly relax, and they spend less time thinking about their problems. It’s more like the cricket in the room with the annoying chirping than an elephant.

I’m not sure if it’s anatomy, a neuron in the brain, or a sign that we come from a more spiritual place but we long to be happy and happiness seems to be our automatic reset point. We want to feel the wind in our hair and the sun on our face. We laugh when it doesn’t make sense, and we find solace in each other. It explains why prisoners of war still smile and don’t give up or why children find joy in the most ordinary of things. Maybe happiness is our brains in survival mode.

The point is that it’s okay to mourn, to be mad as hell, and to be so sad you can’t get out of bed. But it’s also okay to laugh when there isn’t anything funny about your problem or smile when it makes no sense whatsoever. It’s just your spirit reminding you that you deserve to be happy and that your problem will eventually come to an end. When that happens I’m pretty sure you’re going to really smile.