Early on a recent Saturday I found myself in the basement watching water leak out of my furnace. I’d just bought a piece of black rubber for the thing — $400. Now the guy was telling me I’d need a copper coil, most certainly a whole lot more.
Time for a whole new furnace, I figured. So I’ll just mow the yard. Except the lawnmower, into which I’d just poured more than $100 to make it ready for the season, wouldn’t go.
Fine. I’ll mend the little stonewall by the drive. Just need to put this heavy granite rock into place. Except my index finger happened to be in that place, and I got what is known as the “granite kiss.” The pain only intensified during the evening.
Was I supposed to be happy? Cicero apparently thought that one could be happy even on the torture rack. Oh? I doubt he had an oil-fired furnace.
A special focus of this issue is “the pursuit of happiness.” I pursued it when I went out and bought me a brand spanking new, jet black, really boss lawn mower. But is that all there is to happiness?
I’m happy depending on how my lawn mower is running? Epictetus, the Greek philosopher who lived 2,000 years ago, would say no. “The essence of philosophy,” he wrote, “is that a man should so live that his happiness shall depend as little as possible on external things.”
Those who have thought and written about happiness through the ages seem to agree on two things. One, true happiness is not found in things and events, most of which we can’t do anything about. It is more likely found in something greater than ourselves. “True happiness,” the writer Henry James noted, “consists in getting out of one’s self, but the point is not only to get out, you must stay out; and to stay out you must have some absorbing errand.”
Dennis McMahon, an historian, traces the history of thinking about happiness in his article on page 17 and concludes that “we might focus less on our own personal happiness and instead on the happiness of those around us, for relentless focus on one’s own happiness has the potential to be self-defeating.”
Acceptance of what life gives us is a critical part of it, as John Dyben suggests on page 16. Going with the flow, he says, is how we keep broken furnaces and fingernails in perspective.
Ah. To not have my peace of mind dictated by external events, even if I have to type this with a band-aid on my finger. To be grateful that I have a house that needs a furnace, when many don’t. Grateful for the rain this year that has made me need a lawnmower. Grateful even for the fact that pain means I’m alive.
I now regard “the pursuit of happiness” as the wrong goal. “The pursuit of happiness is a most ridiculous phrase,” the novelist C.P. Snow wrote, “If you pursue happiness you’ll never find it.”
Where was he when we were selecting a focus for the issue?
As I assume the editor’s seat with this issue, I am grateful as well for those who have gone before me. Nancy O’Hara and her team launched and sustained Together through its first year, leaving me a legacy of excellence.
Barbara Nicholson-Brown, who, with her late husband, Bill, launched Together Arizona 20 years ago, has become a solid advisor. Rosalie Bischof, who looked at that paper and asked, “Why can’t we do this in New York?” has been a constant source of ideas and inspiration. Richard Horton, our publisher, has become a good friend in just weeks. And Maggie Keough, our Web Director, is my new confidant in all matters editorial.
I am grateful to the writers who put their hearts into this issue. And especially to you for reading. As the word Together suggests, we want your ideas in our pages. Write to us!
And if anyone needs an old lawnmower…
Terry A. Kirkpatrick
