The Pursuit of Happiness

My roommate during my first stint on Semester at Sea wrote down three things she learned each night before she went to bed. I did two blog posts during my first two days on the ship and then gave up, so I give her credit for actually sticking with it. I thought it was sort of a great idea and something I've kept in the back of my head but didn't think about much until now. I've been at camp for three weeks now and each week has had a distinct theme, a sort of lesson that has smacked me in the face as if to say, "Hey you! Think about this." I came here wanting to find some parts of myself that I feel as though I'd lost along the way last year so I decided to run with the idea of a lesson a week, something to think about, ponder, mull over, and reflect upon. The first week's lesson was patience. (See "Patience is a Virtue" post.) The second week's lesson is the pursuit of happiness. Unlike Will Smith in the Hollywood version, I am choosing to spell happiness correctly.

This week I had a group of younger males, mid 20's to early 30's. For the most part, the campers were great. They participated in activities and were genuinely excited to be here. One camper was just about the happiest person I had ever met. In his end of camp paperwork, the best description my co-counselor and I could come up with was "Camper will make you happy when skies are grey." And that's an understatement. He was always smiling, always happy. He would challenge counselors to a "race," line them up in the cafeteria, run a lap, then throw his hands in the air, yelling "Hallelujah!" It made me smile every time. And it happened a lot. Therefore, I smiled a lot that week. He called the the wrong name the entire week, but it didn't matter. I just felt lucky to know him and to, hopefully, help make his camp experience a little better, even though he's the one that definitely did that for me.

On the other end of what I've come to call the happiness spectrum, I had a camper who was unhappy pretty much all of the time. He would fixate on one thing and worry himself into a frenzy. There wasn't really a way to calm his fears until he found the next thing to worry about. He was also having a minor medical issue and complained about that the whole week, using it as an excuse to not participate in activities even though he was perfectly capable. In the five days he was here, I didn't hear a single positive thing come out of his mouth. While it was incredibly frustrating, it also made me stop and think how melancholy it must be to be in such a constant state of worry and anxiety. Toward the end of the week, I asked him what I could do to help take his mind off his troubles and to help him have a fun week at camp since it didn't seem like he was really enjoying himself at all. His response? "I'm just not a happy person." Boom. There it is. This isn't someone who was just having a bad week. This is someone who lives his life in a constant state of worry which sounds a bit like torture if you ask me. He knows this about himself and lives with it. How much of it is treatable and how much of it is a part of his cognitive disability, I'm not sure.

This had me thinking about my own take on happiness. Looking back, sometimes I do tend to find the not so great part about jobs that I've had. In situations like that, it becomes a "misery loves company" mentality. After all, who wants to take the high road and be positive when you have to walk the high road alone? Sounds pretty lonely to me. Then I started to think about all of the things that I was appreciative of about my life and where it is now and about my current job. I happened upon a quote awhile back that I think sums this thought process up quite nicely, "Doing what you like is freedom. Liking what you do is happiness." Nowhere in any of these inspirational quotes about happiness is there a disclaimer or an exception to the rule that if you had a different boss, a different salary, or different coworkers that you would be happy. Happiness depends largely on you and how you choose to respond to your current situation. I haven't always been the best at that, but after spending a week with someone who freely admitted that he just wasn't a happy person and seeing what that looked like, I am determined to change my outlook. While I may not be able to change a given situation, I can certainly change the lens in which I look through.