The dictionary defines happiness as the state of being happy. First of all, I think that is a rule being broken about how you define things. And secondly, not much help there. It defines happy as a feeling or showing pleasure or contentment. A little better, but it really doesn’t get to the heart of it for me. How do we know what contentment is? All of these things are sort of vague and they certainly don’t nail what we mean when we say, are you happy, as a human? Is your life a happy one? I think that happiness is a feeling. Sure, and it’s a state of consciousness. It’s a way of being. And for me, that means love, it means service, it means ease and peace among other things.

Take a moment, if you would, and consider what it means to you to be happy. What words would you use to describe happiness? Be careful not to attach specific outcomes to your happiness. For example, money will not make you happy, but the freedom that it offers might. The Dalai Lama says that attaining happiness, living it, is our purpose here on earth, and I tend to agree with him, but how the hell do we manage it when sometimes it feels like the entire world is crumbling around us? I think Gandhi came the closest when he said happiness is when what you think, what you say and what you do are in harmony. Think about that for a minute. Happiness is when what you think, what you say and what you do are in harmony. Has that feeling, that state of consciousness, way of being that we were just talking about, is something that you control. It’s something that we create.

My grandmother on my father’s side, we called her grammy when we were kids, we called her Ruthie when we got older, really changed before my eyes as I grew older and as she grew older and her life changed. She grew up in this boisterous household. They were English. Her maiden name was Clock. It was a lot of brothers and sisters. And to hear her tell the stories of her childhood, it was an irreverent household. They were quick to laugh, she and her siblings. They made light of things. My grammy, even when she was older, I remember one time she fell over her walker when she was walking to church and had blood dripping down her legs as she went down the aisle to go to her pew, she walked to church every day, and she said that she just could not stop laughing. She had to leave the church because she could not stop laughing at the ridiculousness of walking into church bloody. So really quick to laugh kind of old girl.

She married my grampy, and I mean good, good loving man. He, however, was raised in a different kind of household, a strict conservative German household. And while her humor was light, his, at least according to her stories, tended to have a bite to it. And I don’t think these two incredibly beautiful people ever understood one another that well while they lived together. Throughout their lives together, over 50 years until his death, they lived together and they brought us together often as a family. Family was everything to these two, but they clearly didn’t see one another. There was a resentment there. Maybe even a bitterness. And it hung like a shadow in that house. And as a child, I felt that. I could only sense this unhappiness and I regret that I didn’t feel closer to them until much later in my life because I didn’t get it. I didn’t see them clearly either. But there were times, even back then when I was a child, that really surprised me, and I remember those times clearly to this day, and I’m going to tell you about them, but first we’re going to take a really quick break.