The question is, Does our culture “allow” us to be happy? Or are we all supposed to put on a “happy face” and pretend we’re happy but while being expected NOT to be truly happy?
[TREE HUGGER photo by Littlesprite Photography, c 2008]
I was very impressed with an analogy that I heard in an Abraham-Hicks seminar. The perturbation was one I’ve dealt with myself and worked through myself: how we tell people they can’t be angry or jealous or suffer any of the darker emotions because, according to someone’s religion or the mandated etiquette, to be angry or jealous or depressed or frustrated is a BAD THING and you must TAMP IT DOWN and IGNORE IT. The result of all that hiding of darker but genuine emotion, rather than talking it out, writing it out, or otherwise purging it constructively, is to let it fester and turn inward on itself. Few people in your environment will encourage your anger to be unleashed but it’s sweeter on their own ears and shoulders if you turn it inward and just feel worse and worse and worse…Admitting how you feel would make you an even worse person in the eyes of our society. Besides, we have plenty of drugs to help us handle depression, stress, anxiety, and more, and yet the best they can do is take the edge off the pain, not fill up the emptiness.
What I hadn’t worked out for myself already was the analogy that Abraham-Hicks used, and it left me screaming YES! If you are driving a car with a gas gauge on empty, you go fuel up. You don’t put a smiley-face sticker over the gauge so you don’t have to look at it.
That analogy was a rather perfect description of the last years of my marriage, but also of so much of life around me. We’re all to smile—or at least stop frowning—and get on with life, no matter how much pain we may have endured or still be enduring. Yet, no one really believes anyone else is happy. If someone proclaims utter happiness, don’t we start looking for the cracks? A rare few people say, “I love my life!” and do we really believe them? Sadly, I’ve also known acquaintances to do their best to ruin someone’s genuine but short-lived happiness because the acquaintance didn’t think it was fair or right for the Universe or God to allow someone to have a few moments of happiness.
You know what is utterly bizarre? Really, just think about it: our economy is based on unhappiness.
We buy stuff to make us feel better. Not just “retail therapy” and shopping addictions either, but marketing is based primarily on fear (usually of lack) and greed (which is the need to satisfy lack). Very little marketing is based on anything else, though occasional non-profit fundraisers will point to feeling good about philanthropy. Marketing is all about feeling bad and trying not to, and it’s the foundation of our culture’s business structure.
Here’s an example from my own life. I’ve had an occasional silver hair since I was 18 but I’ve dyed my hair often over the years because I love variety. I was looking in the mirror and noticed a couple of silver hairs at my temple where the last dye had faded. They were actually kinda pretty but I’d be bored with brown and silver hair for the next decade so I gave myself a mental reminder to try a new auburn color or deep brown before my next date. The dyes under my bathroom counter heavily promoted “covering the gray.” For a second, I thought of it as “covering the silver.” But then, silver’s pretty and gray is blah. And “covering” is something that needs to be done to things you should hide, bad things, things you should be ashamed of. Why would you ever want to cover the silver? Silver would be beautiful, enjoyable, valuable, worthy. Gray? Eh…no.
Most ads, most news stories, most messages that come to us in our culture are ones that say we have to buy happiness and hope that some product or service out there can fix us, make us happy, fill us up. I can’t change the messages of our culture overnight, but I can choose not to listen. I can keep following my own path, doing things my way, and being real instead of somebody with a phony smile and with the people around me knowing that when I am smiling, it’s because I can’t NOT smile.
I am determined that my emotions be authentic and unhidden. I don’t know if it will make me insanely happy to do so, but I do know I’m a lot happier being true to my feelings.
c Lorna Tedder
