We forget how to be happy, but children and animals remember

By David McElroy · April 26, 2019

I clearly remember the moment this picture was taken — and I remember why that day was so special to me.

I was visiting my sister and my nieces at their home in Nashville. It was an unhappy time for me — about 10 years ago — because I had gone through an emotionally difficult breakup. I was eating my way through depression and I’d gained a hundred pounds. (I’ve never managed to take all of it off.)

In the middle of that darkness, I lost the ability — at least temporarily — to experience joy or pleasure. The only exceptions to that were the joy and happiness I felt with my nieces and with my cats and dogs.

That’s Anna on the left and Katherine on the right. They were two radically different personalities, but I loved them both. They seemed to enjoy my visits, too. Maybe it was because I gave them interesting gifts. Maybe it was because we would go to Maggie Moo’s for ice cream. But I like to think they just loved me.

I was visiting that day because I had been so unhappy. Seeing them always made me feel loved and it always connected me with something which I find lacking in most of us who have grown old enough to forget.

Thursday evening, Lucy and I were in the car on a quick trip to an ATM. She was in the back seat, but she had her head near my right shoulder, as she tends to do in the car. She periodically rubs slightly against my face and I can almost hear her thoughts.

“I love you so much,” I imagine Lucy thinking. “I’m so happy to be with you every day. I can’t imagine being happier than this.”

It’s no surprise that I call her the World’s Happiest Dog®.

I know better than to think the thoughts in Lucy’s brain are really that complex or self-reflective. But something about her attitude makes me feel that this is how she instinctively feels about life.

It’s the same sort of attitude that I experience from children, for the most part. Even when things don’t go their way, they can quickly find another way to be happy.

And as I thought about this with Lucy, my mind went back to the time I’ve spent with 4-year-old Isabella this week. In her, I experience the same unbounded joy of living that I feel from Lucy. And it’s the same sort of joy that I felt back when I used to visit with Katherine and Anna when they were much younger.

I frequently say that I like children and animals better than most adults. It’s a joke, but there’s some truth in it, too.

Children and animals seem to live in the eternal “now.” They don’t seem to be held back by the past that they can’t change. They’re not crippled by a future they can’t control. They’re not worrying what other people think. They’re not crippled with self-doubt.

They seem to be happy to be alive and enjoying this world.

I know that adults can experience this, too. Every now and then, I’ve met some of them. My mother was one of them. She was very child-like in some ways, and I wonder sometimes if I shouldn’t be more in touch with that part of me which came from her instead of the critical part which I inherited from my father.

But most adults have forgotten how to experience happiness, much less joy.

Most adults are confused about what happiness is. To them, they’ve substituted an odd notion that being happy is about pleasure or “having fun,” which most often seems to involve getting drunk and doing things they wouldn’t do if they were sober.

There’s nothing wrong with having fun, although my idea of fun is very different from that of most people. There’s also nothing wrong with experiencing pleasure, although most people seem to be willing to degrade themselves or others in order to have momentary pleasure.

But fun and pleasure are fleeting. You experience them for a moment and they’re gone. They’re like candy or some form of empty junk food.

Joy is different.

Joy is transcendent. It touches something deeper in your soul. If you remember how to feel joy, it’s something which doesn’t ever fully leave you.

The more true joy you feel, the closer you feel to all of Nature. You start to realize that Creation is more than just a random collection of molecules that somehow magically came to life. You realize that there is meaning in life — not necessarily even in what we accomplish or what we show to other people.

There is meaning in life that comes from just experiencing the joy of being alive.

Children would rarely be able to articulate that. Animals would never be able to comprehend it, much less say it. But children and animals somehow understand that joy. As we become “responsible adults,” we seem to forget the joy. We seem to forget the meaning of life. We forget everything that seemed so obvious when the world was beautiful and innocent.

That’s why I enjoyed Katherine and Anna so much as children.

That’s why I’ve enjoyed spending time with Isabella this week.

That’s why I love Lucy and my cats so fiercely.

They all give me something — a window into something which I barely remember. I want to spend my life more deeply enmeshed in the joy and wonder and happiness which seem to come so easily to them.

As adults, we forget how to do that. A few of us remember — just enough to want it back — and I’m still trying to bring that joy and meaning back to my life full time.

Note: The last photo was from a visit to Nashville to see Katherine and Anna in about 2002. I can’t believe Anna was ever that tiny.

Share on Social Networks

I’ve come to believe that some of us — including me — aren’t very good at knowing how to be happy. I don’t mean that in the sense that happy talk and positive thinking should be able to make us happy regardless of the circumstances. I mean that some of us had so much experience with being unhappy when we were young that we were trained to be unhappy — and that being happy is an unconsciously uncomfortable thing. When I look at times in my past when I should have been happy, it rarely lasted. I believe now that I found reasons to be unhappy — and caused real problems for myself — because being comfortable and happy felt so foreign to my programming. If I’m right, this means that some of us have to do more than just change our circumstances. It means we have to learn how to accept the happiness that we unconsciously fear we don’t deserve.

After I wrote last night about being happy, I thought of an old song that mirrored what I was feeling. After listening to the entire album, I found it remarkable how well the emotions of that music match my own heart at this point in my life. Bob Bennett’s “Matters of the Heart” came out while I was in college. Even after all these years, it holds up really well, and you can listen to the entire album on YouTube. The specific song which matched my feelings last night was “Madness Dancing,” but I still find every song on the album to be strong with the exception of the eighth and ninth. (The song about his parents, called “1951,” is especially poignant.) In fact, the opening and closing songs paint a picture of my heart at its best now in these lines: “A light shining in this heart of darkness, A new beginning and a miracle, Day by day the integration of the concrete and the spiritual.” It’s old music that you’ve probably never heard, but it means a lot to me.

Narcissists tend to turn their children into narcissists — and since a narcissist doesn’t realize he or she is a narcissist, there’s no bad intent. How does this happen? I watched a YouTube video over the weekend from an Australian psychologist who does a nice job of summarizing how it works. None of this is new to me, but I thought it was useful for those who haven’t spent years digging through books and articles about it. The same psychologist has an excellent summary of something which confuses a lot of people about narcissism. You’ve all seen examples of the loud, boisterous and overbearing narcissist, but what about the ones who are more introverted and vulnerable? This type is called a covert narcissist (or a vulnerable narcissist), and this is what my father was. In the first video, I strongly see myself in the ways my father treated me and in the second video, I see what my father was almost successful in making me become.

It’s National Dog Day in the U.S. and Lucy is here to remind you to go express love and appreciation to your favorite canine. Not only does your doggie friend give you love and affection, but he or she also protects your home from intruders — such as birds, squirrels, mail carriers and other undesirables who deserve to be barked at vigorously. Where would we be without that? And if you think this service is actually unnecessary, ask yourself how long it’s been since your home was the victim of a vicious squirrel attack. See? The doggie defense works. Keep barking at ’em, Lucy.

I’ve spent a tremendous amount of time over the last couple of years thinking and writing about love and connection. I’ve come to understand that this lack of love and connection is at the root of a lot of human tragedy and unhappiness, including addictions and depression. As I talked with others and researched the psychology behind the issues, I ran into the surprising fact that researchers are increasingly using psychedelic drugs to allow volunteers to have experiences which are giving them a sense of connection which they’ve lost — something that allows them to feel connected to love and God in a way they didn’t understand before — which is having dramatic effects in combating things such as depression and addictions. In this 15-minute TED talk — without an audience in the age of COVID-19 — Johns Hopkins researcher Mary Cosimano shares her experiences with guided psilocybin sessions being used to treat addiction, depression and end-of-life issues. One of her key observations is the importance of love and connection. She said that it seems love is literally part of the answer. In her role as director of guide/facilitator services for the program, Cosimano is responsible for training and supervising session facilitators.

Related Posts