Getting the happy habit

Last week I realised that I was really happy for the first time since August 1968.
At 7am on Friday morning I was pootling down the M6 on my way to a photo shoot in Stoke; moderate traffic and blue skies were good omens, but they couldn’t account for the smile on my face. That was there for no particular reason, just – because.
There is these days, underpinning my daily life, a general feeling of wellbeing, needing nothing, fussed about nothing, taking each moment as it comes, getting joy from the smallest things. Reassuringly, there are still bad days, sad moments, daft mistakes and assorted frustrations, otherwise there’d be a horrid aroma of smugness.
But I can tell you, it’s fantastic to feel like this. It’s only taken 38 years to get it back: I was a sunny child before my family blew itself into pieces when I was ten, and it’s rather delicious to feel the dimly remembered warmth again.
This happiness thing is not to be bought – but we spend fortunes on self help and more fortunes on conspicuous proof that we are on the road to the elusive Eden.
Even politicians are peddling the happiness agenda – the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs has the job of compiling a happiness index after Tony Blair announced in 2002 that ‘money isn’t everything’ and set his strategy unit to organise a life satisfaction seminar to discuss the implications of a happiness policy.
David Cameron, youthful Tory leader, is all for putting happiness in the manifesto: he is planning an altogether more holistic set of policies for the next Tory government. ‘How are we going to try and make sure that we don’t just make people better off but we make people happier, we make communities more stable, we make society more cohesive?’ Good question, David – staggeringly complex answer.
One answer, according to economist Richard Layard, is for the government to train up 10,000 new cognitive behaviour therapists to transform the needy populace into a functional generation. Making people happy could do more for the health of the nation than all the exercise, diet, anti-smoking and substance abuse campaigns together.
Folk, on average, have far more money, more stuff and more education than our grandparents, but we are no happier; wealth can just mean being miserable in comfort, and fame brings misery in the media spotlight. Can’t buy me love, as the Beatles sang back then – and how right they were.
It’s all very well working out what happiness is, and who’s got it. The question that every human being wants answered is how to get it, and once got, how to sustain it.
As far as I can see, it’s not a question of acquisition, but of relinquishing. ‘Do what brings you joy, and get clear of things which interfere with joy,’ is a reminder on my pin board. OK, cleverclogs, but like what?
Stuff – that’s a good start. Get rid of stuff. We want things, buy things, hang on to things because we fear that we don’t have enough. The consumer society thrives because we can never get enough. But underlying that hidden fear of not having enough is a worse fear – of not being enough. We need status because we have to prove we’re at least as good as the Joneses (Quentin Crisp had it right about the Joneses: ‘Drag them down to your level – it’s cheaper.’).
The tricky stage is clearing out the emotional cupboards. Resentment and bitterness stored since childhood fester, and we can’t understand why we boil over into corrosive rages for no apparent reason; forgotten incidents trigger self-sabotage, and we can’t stop it. Answers are everywhere but in our conscious minds, so intelligence is no help in this subtle alchemy.
The crises that often come with middle age are often the best turning points; after the meltdown comes emptiness, and if you’re bloody lucky, you realise one sunny M6 morning that you’re not empty any more.