How To Be Happy

For a moment, as I was riding home from yoga this morning, I felt that all was right with the world. Of course, this was before I read the paper and got the day’s news of suicide bombings, kidnappings, unjustified military offensives, and ecological destruction across the globe.

Still, for a short time, I felt happy.

Part of this, to be sure, were the post-yoga endorphins coursing through my veins, but another part, I think, was simply that I felt satisfied with my life and what I’m doing with it

And it occurred to me that, for this brief period, anyway, I had hit upon an effective strategy for consistent, if not necessarily long-term, happiness:

Lowering my standards.

If happiness is (at least in part) a by-product of setting goals and reaching them, then I can be pretty happy just by setting simpler goals.

Instead of being dissatisfied that I can’t do the entire intermediate Ashtanga yoga series, I can be pleased that I got myself out of bed to do the first. Rather than being upset that I’m not a world-famous philosopher, I can rest comfortably with being able to read and understand parts of Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics. And in lieu of dissing myself for not churning out pages of the great American novel, I can celebrate success in laying down another 327 words on the blog.

For Aristotle, happiness—eudaimonia—is understood as something like rational activity in accordance with virtue. Essentially, it is all about developing a virtuous character and taking pleasure in behaving virtuously. A person is truly happy, then, when he or she exercises the full array of moral and intellectual virtues, including courage, temperance, generosity, and honesty, among others.

Seems like a lot.

I’m happy when I succeed in completing far more simple actions: riding my bike, reading a book, being kind to my family, and getting enough sleep.

It’s simple to be happy if you’re happy to be simple.