The Purpose of Love

 If you glance for a moment at the leaders of the Trump administration — Bannon, Conway, Miller, and of course, the Cheeto himself — something will become apparent to you, and it’s not that somehow sad lonely angry bloggers took over the USA.

 It is that they are not happy. They are everything but happy, aren’t they? Angry, bigger, vengeful, gloating, guilty, resentful. But not happy. Let’s think about that for a moment.

We say that we “live our truth”. It’s not quite true. We all live the same truth. And that truth is the simplest of all: either we are happy, or we are angry, afraid, ashamed, resentful, bitter. We cannot be both at once, right? Every moment that we are angry, therefore, is one that we are not happy. That great truth is as true as it for you as it is for me as it is for Sith Lord Bannon.

Why is it true? Because there is something even truer?

You and I have one life. Just one. It’s an eyeblink. Not a season, just a glittering afternoon. It is over, gone, before you know it. Take it from me. I spent years supposing I was going to die. And those years came before I thought I’d even had a chance to live.

The question is simple. How are we going to spend the brief afternoon of a life that we have? It is the only thing that we really do have. Death laughs at the rest, doesn’t he? He sees your pride and possessions and vanity, smiling. His scythe glimmers.

The only thing that stops death, even for a moment, is happiness. Those instants the blade of death holds no power over you. Because the ocean of life is in you. A blade can cut down a garden. But what can it do to an ocean?

You know that feeling, don’t you? You feel calm, silent, invincible, whole, true. That is happiness. Not giggling at the latest Real Housewives, or hating off at an internet forum. We’ll get to that. First…

Where then does happiness come from? Pop psych says, proclaims, shouts, a hundred times a day: all you have to do is choose happiness!! Choose it!! If you’re not choosing happiness, it must be your fault!! After all, what fool wouldn’t choose happiness?

But it’s not that simple, is it? You can try and try to choose it, like it was a flavor of toothpaste on the shelves at Walmart…and somehow, not at all like a commodity, possession, product, it’s just not there. The shelves of your soul seem to be empty of it. Why can’t you just “choose happiness” like it was a product at a supermarket? Where does it go?

Happiness is the simplest thing of all in this little life. And it is also the most dangerous. Would you like to know why? There’s only one secret to happiness.

Be a person.

Go ahead, roll your eyes, get it out of your system. Feel better? Good. Now let’s talk about it. Being a person isn’t as simple as you think it is. Just because you were born a human does not mean that you discovered or embraced or realized your humanity.

A person is a being that is essentially and mostly good. Do you doubt me? Do you think people are bad? If you are a person, and you see someone, anyone, another being, suffering, then you will instantly feel. Compassion, empathy, pity. If you do not act to relieve that suffering, then you will feel guilt and shame. If you don’t feel any of that, then there is something missing in you, isn’t there? So being a person is very simple.

It is our denial of who we are that makes this life hard, and happiness harder.

 To be a person is to accept the inescapability, the destiny, the power of one’s inner goodness. Goodness, in all its names: mercy, rebellion, defiance, grace, imagination, purity, gentleness, humility. Goodness, in it’s one true name: love.

Happiness is the gift of being a person, the reward of accepting one’s goodness. When we accept the goodness in us, then we can only but love. Why? If one has accepted that one’s nature is good, then so must the nature of all. You are not any different from me, are you? If you are, who made you different? We may “like” different things — but deep down, in our souls, we are precisely the same. Just like you, me, and Bannon: the same in an existential sense — we can either be happy or angry, but not both. Therefore, if we are all the same, then our greatest obligation in this life, is, as Camus said, to love. How else is happiness to come into being?

 I have said a set of things that has probably made you angry. I’d bet that you are already rebelling at this set of thoughts. I know you, because I’ve been you. You are already thinking: “it’s not that simple! Happiness isn’t all that…it’s not any of that!”. Why are you thinking this? Because what I’ve just discussed goes against everything that you’ve been taught to believe, especially if you’re American.

The origin myth of this age is the myth of the terrible person. We’re conditioned to believe exactly the opposite. That we can be terrible people, and still be happy. Or worse, that we can be terrible people, and only then be happy. But is to true? Do the terrible people seem happy to you? They don’t to me. How could it be true? When we are terrible people, we must numb ourselves to grief, pain, suffering. But the price of that numbness is that we are also unable to be happy. Mostly, we are doing the work of burying our guilt and fear and shame, and externalizing our anger and rage. And, as we’ve already proven, you cannot be happy and angry at the same time.

 If you’re a terrible person, you can have moments of pleasure, sure. You can gloat, win a moment of relief, satisfy your greed and jealousy and vanity. Guess what? That isn’t happiness. Happiness is a different, and higher, experience altogether. It isn’t the satisfaction of our lowest appetites. It is freedom from them. It is the realization of our possibility. Happiness is what you feel when you love. Not when you are applauded for being a terrible person by people who believe being that way will lead them to happiness, when it won’t.

So we have a broken philosophy of happiness. Our epistemology of it is all wrong. We don’t even seem to know what happiness is. Those few moments that many of us feel it, I’d bet that we work very hard bury it. Because we feel guilty and ashamed of our own happiness. They’ve told us to be terrible people, haven't they? Therefore, happiness itself is dangerous.

But it always has been. There’s nothing more dangerous in this world, this broken place of angry and vengeful people, than a genuinely happy person. Because only a happy person is one who proves the truth of the greatest truth of them all, which is love.

Be that way. Your life is already ending. Every breath you take is shallower than the last. You can’t choose happiness. But you can be who you truly are. A person, in this world, this life, on this little ball of mud, spinning beneath the stars, wondering at the beauty and impossibility of the purpose of love. Us.