by Doug Stowe

Created on: January 01, 2007   Last Updated: September 13, 2010

There is a pervasive human desire, as urgent as hunger, to discover the secret to happiness; to chance upon a mythical "philosopher's stone" of sustained and uninterrupted bliss. It is a subject that is as broad as an open mind and as deep as a black hole. To treat with it appropriately would require the lifetime work of more than one dedicated scholarly philosopher and a great deal of dialogue between many sound minds. Even then, the outcome would, most likely, be a hung jury.

It is an egregious flight of monomania for anyone to confidently state that they possess it. Subjectively, the concept of happiness for most people is a band-aid placed on their most pressing momentary trouble: "If I could only get out of debt, I'd be happy."; "Oh, I could be so happy with a house and kids and someone to love." For yet another sector, happiness is a Utopian state in which "we could all just love one another", despite eons of cultural shaping, and the tough-as-nails belief by every sect that they have God under contract.

The secret to happiness, in my view, is that there is no secret, no elixir, no quick -fix. And the manic pursuit of this romantic ideal has been the cause of much of mankind's unhappiness. John Steinbeck said: "What is warmth without a little cold to give it sweetness?" and in that question he metaphorically and neatly summed up the answer to the conundrum of the spirit that seeks an unattainable "Holy Grail". Happiness is a direction not a place, a shifting state that answers the Yin and Yang demands of the cosmos. We may experience transient periods of happiness or rather, satisfaction, but the state of grace we seek, the permanent "Father Knows Best" blandness of unchanging, unrelenting happiness simply does not exist nor should it. Its very mundane predictability would contradict the definition. Accepting this can make life's journey more acceptable and help allay the constant dis-ease that envelopes us as we bow more and more to the socially imposed sense of failure we are supposed to feel at being always vaguely unhappy.

The shrewd and the jaded take advantage of our born-again fervour for happiness. They hawk it shamelessly like vendors at a fair with books: "Get Out Of My Way 6 Easy Steps To Material Happiness"; with TV: "Unhappy With Your Body?...A New You In Just 60 Days". ..you get the point!

Our levels of expectation have been ratcheted up year after year by cynical ad men who whip us into a frenzy for i-Pods and perfect wedding days ( leading

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