The Road to Happiness
The Road to HappinessIf you look around at the men and women whom you can call happy,you will see that they all have certain things in common.The most important of these things is an activity which at most gradually builds up somethingthat you are glad to see coming into existence.Women who take an instinctive pleasure in their childrencan get this kind of satisfaction out of bringing up a family.Artists and authors and men of science get happiness in this wayif their own work seems good to them.But there are many humbler forms of the same kind of pleasure.Many men who spend their working life in the citydevote their weekends to voluntary and unremunerated toil in their gardens,and when the spring comes, they experience all the joys of having created beauty.The whole subject of happiness has, in my opinion,been treated too solemnly.It had been thought that man cannot be happy without a theory of life or a religion.Perhaps those who have been rendered unhappy by a bad theorymay need a better theory to help them to recovery,just as you may need a tonic when you have been ill.But when things are normal a man should be healthy without a tonicand happy without a theory.It is the simple things that really matter.If a man delights in his wife and children, has success in work,and finds pleasure in the alternation of day and night, spring and autumn,he will be happy whatever his philosophy may be.If, on the other hand, he finds his wife fateful, his childrens noise unendurable,and the office a nightmare;if in the daytime he longs for night, and at night sighs for the light of day,then what he needs is not a new philosophy but a new regimena different diet, or more exercise, or what not.Man is an animal, and his happiness depends on his physiology more than he likes to think.This is a humble conclusion, but I cannot make myself disbelieve it.Unhappy businessmen, I am convinced,would increase their happiness moreby walking six miles every daythan by any conceivable change of philosophy.
