The German word for happiness- well, probably one of the words, but since my German isn't very good it's the only one I know-- is "Gluchlich." And this used to bother me, just a little, because it is so clearly related to the English word "lucky." It irritated me to think that an entire language could seriously assume that happiness was up to luck, that you couldn't influence your own fate about this most basic of psychological needs. I know very well indeed that we aren't always in perfect control of our emotional lives, but this seemed to be a bridge too far.
Then I read a book by Tony Danza, of Who's the Boss fame, about doing a TV reality show in which he taught a high school English class for a year in a tough high school in Philadelphia. (The book's title is I'd Like to Apologize to Every Teacher I Ever Had.) What I mostly got out of that book was that good teaching doesn't necessarily make for good reality TV, because good teaching inherently involves less drama than reality TV needs. But towards the beginning, as he was talking about how he got to the point of doing the reality TV show, he talked about how he had many friends who were just as talented and just as hardworking has he had been, but that getting the role in Who's the Boss was a lucky break for him. It was his way of acknowledging that he was no better than-- well, maybe not anyone else, but many of the people he knew and respected. I liked that--and suddenly I became a lot more OK with Gluchlich as a concept.
I am aware that happiness can be cultivated-- that's the hardworking part. But somehow I feel calmer and happier myself when I know there's some unfairness built into the system. If I don't have as much as someone else, it isn't automatically because I wasn't as good as them at something. It even, oddly, makes it easier to be happier for them. If you know it isn't a perfectly balanced system to start with, there's no use weeping or wailing when it shows itself to be what you already knew it was. :D
