About a month ago, I met my college roommate Leah in the West Village for a day of New York-ing. We did it all. We sat in a sunny window with prosecco and overstayed our welcome at an Italian cafe for lunch; we visited Casa Magazines, a tiny yet mighty shop that has anything you could possibly want in print; we bought tortoise shell hair clips at a fancy drug store; we stopped for meringue at a French bakery; and we walked till we could not walk anymore, at which point we plopped ourselves down at the nearest bar to recover.
Mid-afternoon, after ordering meringue, we paused and took a selfie to send mutual friends. In the photo we look like we are up to something, but in a good way, a way that might entice you to tag along or indulge or forget your to do list — Leah with her cute haircut and mischievous lift of the chin, me smiling the smile of a person who poses with an eight-inch piece of meringue held up for the world to see. We look thrilled with ourselves. And we were.
As the weekend faded, I continued thinking about that photo. There was something about it that drew me in and kept me looking back. Eventually, after a couple of days, I realized what made it so compelling: In the photo, I looked happy. I mean really happy. Nearly overflowing.
The happiness I noticed in the photo, however desirable it may be, was striking to me for its play on opposites, its contrast to other threads in the tapestry of my life. My smiling face, beaming and ridiculous in the glow of that French bakery, stands out precisely because I know what it is like to be on the other side of that feeling.
When I look at myself in that photo, I see a person who has struggled to connect with family; who has been hurt by those who were not supposed to let her down; who misses her brother, whom she has not seen in nearly a decade; and who worries about her other disabled brother’s future. In other words, I see a person who knows sorrow and suffering and chose happiness anyway.
It is that choice that I find so moving — not just for myself, but for all of us.
***
Our ability to choose happiness is like a secret power we have in a world that too often leaves us feeling helpless and stuck. The potential of happiness — the possibility of finding it, or perhaps just noticing the places in our lives where it already exists — gives us a foothold. We can wave a wand, so to speak, and magically conjure the kind of life we want. Or at least we can try.
I make it sound simple, but being happy does not always feel easy. We fight with ourselves; we struggle with all manner of systems stacked against us; we live with unmet desire. Our natural rhythms collide with the world’s and we are left depleted.
The stoics thought that happiness stems from recognizing which parts of life are within our control and which are not. They make it sound even easier than I do. Our thoughts are within our control, they said, and not much else.
In Meditations, Marcus Aurelius taught, “You have power over your mind—not outside events. Realize this and you will find strength.” It is apparently that simple. Epictetus shared a similar thought in his Discourses. “There is only one way to happiness and that is to cease worrying about things which are beyond the power of our will.”
To stop worrying sounds appealing, but nearly impossible in a time when our very ability to exist on this planet is being threatened and we cannot seem to put out all the little, constant fires in our path in time to reach the big one. Yet even the worst of the issues we are facing qualifies, by the stoics’ standards, as being outside ourselves, and in response I imagine Aurelius would point us back towards Meditations, where he asserts, “Very little is needed to make a happy life; it is all within yourself.”
When he says all I need for happiness is within myself, he is referencing that which I can control, that which I own — my mind and my thoughts. Of course, no matter how much I desire happiness, my thoughts are harder to quell when fuming than I would like. And that is only what goes on within myself, which is hard enough. On top of that, it feels impossible as a caring, engaged citizen of the world to simply push our pressing issues aside as something beyond my personal realm of control.
But recognizing that something is beyond my control does indicate a lack of care on my part. It simply means that I am making a choice not to place the core of my happiness atop a raging fire.
Maybe being happy is more straightforward than it seems.
The simplicity with which the stoics view these consuming foundational matters of our lives, the ones we wrestle with every day like how to feel happy and fulfilled, was a conscious choice. For them, simplifying the approach to living was part of the equation for happiness.
Aurelius puts that simplicity further in perspective when he says, “Since the vast majority of our words and actions are unnecessary, corralling them will create an abundance of leisure and tranquility. As a result, we shouldn’t forget at each moment to ask, is this one of the unnecessary things?”
***
I become more convinced all the time that happiness and joy and pleasure are the way. The way to live, the way to find meaning, the way to greater purpose.
When I say that pleasure is a necessary path, I do not intend to point us towards any new-agey spiritual bypassing made for Instagram. We will inevitably continue to encounter difficulty, and it is our responsibility to remain clear-eyed even as we cultivate our own pleasure. Allowing our personal happiness to take up space does not mean denying disease or assuming poverty is a moral failure.
But looking towards what makes us happy reveals a secret map that animates our path and provides all the clues we need about how to live. If we do the things, at home and work and play, that bring us pleasure, then each day feels a little easier, and we begin to notice the ways it surrounds us. When we recognize the happy parts of our lives that already exist, rather than constantly pining after something else, the joy present in our everyday becomes free to bubble to the surface.
In the Discourses, it was Epictetus that said, “It is impossible that happiness, and yearning for what is not present should ever be united.”
Every time I look at myself in the meringue photo Leah and I took last month, I see a person who has spent a lot of her life yearning for what is not present. But eventually, with a little grace and some faith and optimism pulled from deep within, I came to understand that even the struggles of the people I love most, the ones connected to me by blood and lineage and last name, even the circumstances that have shaped my life in unwanted ways, are beyond my control. However difficult they are, they are not mine, and it is not my responsibility to fix them.
I learned that even when one side of the coin shows despair, undeniable and etched in metal, I am free to flip it over and find happiness on the other side.
And that is the reason I can tell you now that even though our planet is burning, even though guns appear on the subway, even though we cannot trust politicians to save us, we can still choose joy as the way. We can act on matters beyond ourselves while nurturing pleasure within ourselves. We have the capacity to hold the good and bad and beautiful and terrible all at once, and increasingly, going forward, that will be our primary job.
Between you and me—
When editing, I always read whatever I have written aloud, because it helps me catch things my eyes miss and, most of all, it helps me arrange letters and sounds and shapes into the rhythms I want. Today, I read “Epictetus” as “Epicurious” two different times, out loud and proud, which is now a private little joke in my brain that I am sharing with you. Epicurious says happiness is simple. Epicurious knows the secrets to life. I wonder how many times I will get it wrong in the audio version.
The audio version is a real delight for me to make, by the way, because I love reading aloud and using my voice, which has always been a huge part of my life, and connecting with readers through time and space and sound waves. How are audiocasts working for you?
John is conducting in Nashville this week, and Herbie and I are slowing down after a couple of months on the road. We are wishing you all the best things. Take care out there.
The audio version of WE’RE ALL FRIENDS HERE is published every Wednesday. Last week’s, which was about marriage as a miracle, is available on Spotify, Apple, Substack, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
WE’RE ALL FRIENDS HERE is written by Lauren Maxwell. Can you help us grow? Send this to a friend who likes armchair philosophy and ask them to subscribe. Share it on Instagram and tag @lauren_only. You can also become a sponsor, which makes this publication possible. Every gesture of support is appreciated!