The Courage to Gaze into Happiness

Feeling Safe and Secure Isn't the Same as Being Too Comfortable

More and more creative people find they do their best work when they’re feeling healthy and secure. We know writers who no longer need to be drunk or in agony to shed the numbness of their daily routine and tap into the full powers of their imagination.

They have discovered, to their initial embarrassment, that the muses aren’t vampires who feed on suffering. They are co-conspirators who enjoy working with collaborators who are well-rested, well-fed, and well-loved.

We have filmmaker friends whose best work flows not from the depths of alienated self-doubt but rather from the heights of well-earned bliss. They have noticed that despair is monotonous. It tends to produce art about despair on the subject of despair. Joy, on the other hand, is promiscuously curious and will follow a thread of inquiry anywhere it leads.

Musician P. J. Harvey is the patron saint of this new breed. “When I’m contented, I’m more open to receiving a lot of inspiration,” she testified. “I’m most creative when I feel safe and happy.”

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But wait. We already hear the objection rising up, and we’ve even arranged for it to be delivered by Eckhart Tolle, who has been quoted on a thousand inspirational memes as saying, “I’ve never heard of anybody who awakens in their comfort zone.”

There’s a kernel of hard truth buried in his tidy formulation. Few of us wake up by burrowing deeper into our nest of pillows. Comfort, in the sense of the cushioned avoidance of all friction, can be a soporific. On that narrow point, Tolle and I agree.

Here’s where we part ways, though. Comfort is different from safety and security, even quite different from happiness. To conflate them is the central error of the entire tormented-genius mythology, and it’s the reason so many gifted people sabotage their own well-being in the superstitious belief that misery is the price of admission to the visionary state.

Child psychologists have a term for the truth that Tolle’s aphorism misses: the secure base. When a toddler is in a strange room and her caregiver is present and attentive, she will venture farther from that caregiver and take more bold experimental risks than a child who feels abandoned. She feels safe.

The scared child clings, while the secure child explores. Safety nurtures the urge to wander into the unknown.

So when we hear that no one awakens in their comfort zone, we counter with a more accurate and more generous proposition: Many of us awaken from a secure base.

The diver who plumbs the abyss is roped to a boat full of friends, and the pilgrim who sets out for the world’s end packs a knapsack and trusts she has a home to return to. The artist who descends into the underworld of the imagination does her bravest work because an animal part of her knows she is held.

At the Beauty and Truth Lab, we have retired the archetype of the tormented genius. We have zero attraction to books and movies and songs by depressed jerks whose work is celebrated but whose lives are a mess.

Stories about supposedly interesting creeps don’t rouse our perverse fascination, because we’ve broken our addiction to perverse fascination. We kicked the habit the way one kicks any habit: slowly, with relapses, and with a great deal of help from people who had already gotten clean.

When hearing about illustrious creators who brag that they feel most stimulated when they’re angry or miserable, we unleash the Official Beauty and Truth Lab Histrionic Yawn.

We have learned to recognize the boast for what it is: not a report from the frontier of consciousness but a recruitment poster for a cult whose chief sacrament is self-harm.

We decline the invitation, having other plans for our one wild and precious nervous system.

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Sadly, many storytellers and artists are still addicted to the old delusions about the risks of good mental health. Even those who don’t view peace of mind as a threat to their creative power often believe that it’s a rare commodity attainable only through dumb luck.

“One cannot divine nor forecast the conditions that will make happiness,” said novelist Willa Cather. “One only stumbles upon them by chance, in a lucky hour, at the world’s end somewhere.”

We generally love Cather’s writing, but we hereby register our respectful dissent to this formulation of hers.

Happiness isn’t a meteorite that may or may not happen to strike you. It’s a garden. It’s the consequence of attention paid daily over seasons, of weeding and watering and the patient observation of which plants thrive in your particular soil.

To say happiness comes only by luck is to confess that you have never tried to grow any.

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There is another obstacle to overthrowing the status quo. Oppressively nice, indiscriminately optimistic, sentimental comfort-hoarders give happiness a bad name. They seem to justify the novelist Flaubert’s mean-spirited observation that “To be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost.”

But the happiness we champion isn’t stupid and selfish. It’s not the bovine contentment of a creature that has never had a difficult thought. It’s fierce, hard-won, clear-eyed, and fully aware of every horror the world contains. It just refuses to let those horrors have the last word.

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Here’s a third blotch on the reputation of happiness: that it’s mostly an absence of pain. In The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, Sogyal Rinpoche frames the issue well: “Would you prefer the happiness of scratching a mosquito bite over the happiness of not having a mosquito bite in the first place?”

The tormented genius is forever scratching. He has mistaken the temporary relief of his self-inflicted itch for joy, and he can’t imagine a life in which the bite was never administered.

We are interested in the other kind of happiness, the unscratched kind that doesn’t require a wound to authenticate itself.

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It’s possible to define a more supple variety of happiness that doesn’t paralyze the will or sap ambition.

For the first clue about how to proceed, we turn to researchers Rick Foster and Greg Hicks. In their book How We Choose to Be Happy: The 9 Choices of Extremely Happy People, they reveal that the number one trait of happy people is . . . can you guess? . . . a serious determination to be happy.

This shocking, iconoclastic assertion overturns everything the romance of suffering would have you believe. The happiest people aren’t the luckiest people. They are the most committed people, who treat their own well-being as a discipline worth practicing rather than a windfall worth awaiting.

Bliss is a habit we can cultivate, in other words, not an accident that we stumble upon by chance, in a lucky hour, at the world’s end somewhere.

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News flash: In a culture that profits from our dissatisfaction and markets to our wounds and aches, choosing happiness on purpose is an act of rebellion.

The cynic imagines he is the brave one, the realistic adult. But we have come to suspect the opposite. Cynicism is the path of least resistance. It costs nothing and risks nothing and protects its owner from ever being caught caring.

The truly daring move, the genuinely dangerous and against-the-grain move, is to remain tender and hopeful and creatively alive in full view of everything that argues against it.

There’s a body of research that backs this up, too. Psychologist Barbara Fredrickson’s broaden-and-build theory tells us that joy, interest, and contentment feel good and also broaden the mind. They expand the range of thoughts and actions a person can call upon, widening the field of the possible.

Fear and despair narrow us to a single grim corridor of fight-or-flight. Delight throws open every door and invites us to explore the rooms we didn’t know were there. The muse, it turns out, has been telling P. J. Harvey the truth all along.

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For the final clue about how to conjure up a kind of happiness that doesn’t anesthetize the soul, we call on poet Kenneth Koch. Here’s what he wrote about Nobel Prize-winning poet Saint-John Perse: “So many poets have the courage to look into the abyss. But Perse had the courage to look into happiness.”

Here is the answer to Eckhart Tolle and to every gospel that equates awakening with anguish. Looking into the abyss is the easy assignment. It has been done a trillion times. It’s the safe, expected, well-rewarded gesture. Ironically, it’s the true comfort zone of the modern artist, where applause is guaranteed and no one will ever accuse them of being naive. Any sad clever person can stare into the void and report back that it’s really fucking dark.

On the other hand, to look into happiness is bold and rebellious. It’s the work that few of us have the nerve for. How crazy demanding is it for any of us to gaze steadily at joy without flinching, without being ironic or sarcastic, without rushing to undercut it with a caveat, to take it as seriously and render it as precisely as other artists render their suffering.

That’s genuinely uncharted territory. We awaken outside our comfort zone not by courting the misery everyone expects of us. We dare the harder, stranger, more exposing thing: to be fully, bravely, creatively well.

But How Dare You, Now?

Some of you may already be drafting an indignant letter. How dare I counsel the cultivation of joy during the Trumpocalypse, with cruelty enthroned, with the sick and the poor and the hunted informed daily that their misery is the policy working exactly as intended.

To prescribe happiness now can sound not just unreasonable but obscene. I hear and honor that complaint. But here’s the precision: The happiness I champion isn’t the placid, passive contentment of the comfort-hoarder. It’s fierce, hard-won, clear-eyed, and fully aware of every horror the world contains.

If we announce we’re too heartsick for joy while the regime does its cruel work, then we perform the exact comfort-zone flinch we warned against, and feel righteous while performing it.

Those of us in pure, inconsolable despair keep missing the truth that demoralization is the evil regime’s intention. A machine built on cruelty requires your exhaustion. It manufactures the 3 a.m. dread and the slow leak of your ability to imagine anything better, because people too depressed to picture a livable future won’t lift a finger to build one. In the end, our uncompromising despair is compliance.

So I double the prescription, for me and everyone who considers this a worthy antidote. Get well-rested, well-loved, as happy as you can, and dangerous, too, because that’s how we will survive the fight for as long as it may take.

The bullies in power would love to see us too sad to build. Let’s refuse them that reflex.

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FREE WILL ASTROLOGY

Week of August 6

LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): Within most galaxies are dense clouds of gas and dust that astronomers call “star factories.” Here and there, the magic of gravity gradually gathers together diffuse material into concentrated clusters until nuclear fusion ignites, creating brilliant new suns. I suspect you will be operating a metaphorical star factory in the coming weeks and months, Leo. Small ideas, fragments of plans, or tentative experiments could coalesce in productive ways. Through your patient attention and care, luminous concentrations of useful beauty will emerge.

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): Virgo biologist Stephen Jay Gould argued that evolution isn’t a ladder of progress but a branching bush of experimentation. Most species that ever existed are extinct, but they weren’t failures. For a very long time, they were successful experiments in being alive, well adapted to their environment. When conditions changed, they ended. That’s how evolution works. Let’s apply this lesson to your life, Virgo. If a part of your world is concluding, celebrate and thank it, then bid it a fond farewell. Feel grateful that it succeeded completely at what it was meant to do and gave you all it had to give.

LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22): Your sense of purpose is intensifying. Your people need you more than ever, and your gifts are ripening just as they are most valuable to your community. But I must add that the road ahead will not be frictionless. You will have to outmaneuver diversionary tactics and dispel pockets of confusion. To serve as a shimmering catalyst of beauty and truth for your allies—and a shrewd strategist in the presence of deflections—lean into the paradoxical counsel attributed to Jesus: Be gentle and pure like a dove, yet keenly perceptive and discerning like a serpent.

SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): Concrete continues to cure beyond the time when it’s first poured. After seven days, it has 70 percent of its ultimate strength, and after 14 days, 90 percent. It usually keeps getting sturdier for a few months, even years. I propose that we use this as a metaphor for what you’re working on, Scorpio. The foundations you established a while back are still solidifying. Projects that are working pretty well are still developing potency. This is a good thing! Everything is slowly improving through processes you’re not actively managing.

SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21): Here’s your assignment: Find yourself a pair of enchanted pants that will bring you good luck and stir up fun. How will you know that they’re authentically charmed? Because when you put them on, you will instinctively wander toward adventures that expand your understandings about life. They may also lead you to explore places and situations that aren’t truly forbidden or taboo, but which you have oddly avoided as if they were forbidden or taboo. Finally, your enchanted pants are likely to inspire you to dream up a few crazy good ideas that will turn out not to be mostly good and not at all crazy.

CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19): In classical music, a “fermata” is a symbol on the sheet music that instructs the instrumentalist to hold a note longer than its written duration. How long? It’s unpredictable. The musician decides. I think your life would benefit from a metaphorical fermata or two, Capricorn—maybe even more. You won’t come to a protracted pause, but you will engage in strategic prolonging, extending certain notes beyond their expected duration. Examples? Lingering longer in a conversation from which you’re inclined to exit early; staying with an ambiguous emotion rather than rushing to resolution; allowing a project to develop more leisurely than you might if you were simply pushing for sheer efficiency. Opt for what’s soulful instead of what’s crisp and neat.

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AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18): Fate is subtly but insistently pressuring you to stop squandering energy on half-hearted, hand-me-down desires. Why? So your real, holy obsessions can move to the center of your attention. The tepid wishes and lukewarm yearnings are being exposed for what they are: distractions that nibble away at your time and passion without fully feeding your soul. As these mediocre drives fade in importance, you’ll be exultant to see how much more fire, clarity, and juice you have available for the few burning, churning yearnings that truly belong to you.

PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20): The Mariana Trench in the Pacific Ocean is so deep that if Mount Everest were located at the bottom, its peak would be over a mile underwater. The deepest point in the ocean could swallow the highest point on land with room to spare. The world holds more below than above. Please meditate on this fun fact, Pisces. I hope it inspires you to understand that your most interesting power often lies in the depths, not the peaks. While others are summiting, you’re descending into the mysterious, fathomless interiors. Your explorations may not photograph well because they happen in darkness. But they are the source of your strength.

ARIES (March 21-April 19): In the early days of aviation, navigation instruments were rudimentary, and the skies were often a blur of clouds, darkness, or featureless horizons. Pilots sometimes relied on a technique called “dead reckoning”: good instinct bolstered by simple instruments like compasses and stopwatches. I suspect you will benefit from practicing a metaphorical version of dead reckoning in the coming weeks. You may not have all the data you would like, and the path ahead might be less than clear. But you already possess enough hints and inklings to make thoughtful approximations. If you’re alert and flexible, listening to subtle signals within you and around you, your evolving estimates will guide you uncannily close to the right destination.

TAURUS (April 20-May 20): Nineteenth-century poet Emily Dickinson rarely left her comfortable home in Amherst, Massachusetts. Her favorite activity was to sit in her bedroom and compose her odd, unique, brilliant poems. Eventually, she wrote 1,800 of them, though few were published during her lifetime. Today she is renowned as one of America’s great literary geniuses. Her story reminds us that magnificent growth may emerge from simple and humble circumstances. I suspect you will thrive if you borrow her strategy during the coming weeks. You don’t need a hubbub of flashy events to evoke your beauty. A period of creative stillness could amplify your imagination and inspire your dazzle.

GEMINI (May 21-June 20): In Renaissance workshops, apprentice painters learned their craft by assisting masters with small tasks. They mixed pigments, prepared canvases, and cleaned up. There was a valuable trade-off for this humble work. Being in proximity to mature brilliance often spurred the fledgling artists to harness their own creative powers. I suspect this dynamic is relevant for you, Gemini. Now is a favorable time to be alert for unexpected teachers and lessons. Be ready to apprentice yourself to captivating experiences where you might learn what you didn’t even realize you needed to know. Your willingness to be a curious, gracious student is your superpower.

CANCER (June 21-July 22): If you knew you were going to live to 95 in reasonably good health, what additional careers or adventures might you pursue? Visualize your lifespan stretching out before you like a wide winding road, where you will have plenty of time not just to survive, but to experiment, wander, and reinvent yourself. Would you train for a new craft or profession? Would you move to another country for a while and apprentice yourself to a language, landscape, or tradition that has always piqued your curiosity? I invite you to take a concrete step that moves you in the direction of interesting future fun.

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