This post is part of the A to Z 2020 Challenge. I have decided to theme the posts around personal and societal responses to the Covid 19 crisis, including my resumption of Blogging!
Happiness is a Warm Gun…Momma
This song penned by John Lennon is full of double-entendres. Lennon explained that he got the title from an article in a National Rifle Association magazine and he divided the song into three sections, “the Dirty Old Man”, “the Junkie”, and “the Gunman (Satire of ’50s R&R)”. By the last, he meant his sexual desire for Yoko Ono. That there are those for whom a literal warm gun is happiness, that some apparently find happiness in drugs whilst sexual love is yet another form of happiness shows what a complex thing is our “pursuit of Happiness”.
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Can we be happy all the time?
In the practice of Zen (and bearing in mind that those who know don’t say and those who say don’t know) it is said that there is constant attention to carrying out the simplest task of living with perfection. Does this bring happiness? It doesn’t sound full of highs nor lows and most people believe that without the lows, we cannot have the highs of happiness. If this present crisis is doing anything positive for us, it is to give us the chance of reflecting on what makes us happy, either because we are deprived of it, thinks lovers separated by social isolation, or because we are with the source of our happiness – oh to be young and in love and in lockdown – would you ever leave your bed! And no, its not just the young who are happy to be locked down with the one they love…
In nine months time, there is likely to be a baby boom whilst it is from the post-war baby boom that many of the victims of Covid 19 are drawn. Whilst this will undeniably reduce some of the future costs to health services for whom the preponderance of older patients, living longer with increasingly solvable but expensive conditions, it will give civil servants no happiness any more than the loss of migrants and the very poor who are also more susceptible to the disease will give no happiness except perhaps, to the vilest of right-wing politicians.
Meanwhile, we take our happiness in lockdown as we may…
Is Happiness an Instinct?
A friend of mine once told me how, during a search for a friend who it was thought, had drowned himself in a local lake, she went in a rowing boat with her lover, and after a time, they wordlessly pulled into the shore and made love. She described it as somehow instinctual, driven, and it puzzled her that in the midst of sorrow and dread, that this should have been their reaction. Many young women gave themselves to young men about to depart for the fighting during the Second World War (perhaps all wars) and if there was a moment of happiness for each of them, did it result in a happy event nine months later. (Imagine the psychologists trying to devise an experiment to test that hypothesis!) Happiness can be mixed with poignant sadness if the father never made it back or perhaps was not even known – so maybe the urge to procreate in the face of disaster is an instinct rather than the pursuit of momentary happiness. If we are driven by instinct, then where does happiness fit in? We human beings need to stay together for perhaps 21 years in order to raise a family, so the joys of sex are but rarely resultant in pregnancy but can form the glue that holds couples together – if they are lucky, and that is why it is not just the young, who may be enjoying the lockdown in their empty nests.
Do animals feel happiness?
It’s so hard not to be anthropocentric when looking at animals, to see the dog with its head on its master’s lap, to watch seagulls shooting the breeze or lambs leaping as they are in the fields here, and not imagine they feel happy – who knows. When I watch lambs playing, I simultaneously feel happy for the moment and sad because I know that very soon they will no longer be frisky but head down grazing for the rest of their lives with no great appearance of happiness ever again…
So there are my thoughts for the day – gather ye rosebuds in whatever ways you can at this sad/happy time. Listen to the bird-song without the roar of traffic, bask under skies not crisscrossed with con-trails, breath deep in the less polluted air, love the one(s) you’re with, practice Zen or whatever floats your boat (within the confines of the lockdown) and if you haven’t got a boat, your mind can imagine whatever you like and you can be happy with it…
What has made me happy? Last night I took my new telescope outside for the first time and looked at the moon, large and even though slightly hazy, pure magic and wonder!
