English Literature – Articles ☆ Positive Education # 03: Happiness and Well-being ☆ Shri Jagat Singh Bisht ☆

Positive Emotion, engagement, relationships, meaning and accomplishment

“Happiness is the meaning and purpose of life, the whole aim and end of human existence.”

Aristotle

Happiness means different things to different persons. For some, it is a feeling of cheerfulness and merriment. For others, it may be calm and inner peace. Some gain happiness by buying a new mobile phone or car, others derive happiness in giving and compassion. One feels happy racing a bike at high speed and another by sitting still in a tranquil forest.

What actually is happiness and what it is not?

Happiness is the experience of joy. One may jump and shout to express joy, but it could also be a quiet feeling of contentment and inner peace.

Thich Nhat Hanh is absolutely right when he says, “Sometimes your joy is the source of your smile, but sometimes your smile can be the source of your joy.”

You feel happy when you are deeply involved in your hobby, when you have been kind to someone, or when you have achieved something worthwhile.

Making someone happy, makes you happy too. Dalai Lama says, “If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion.’

No one else can make us happy or unhappy. We are responsible for the happiness or unhappiness we experience. We can all make ourselves happier.

Anthony Seldon has some good advice for us, “The still and the harmonious mind is happy and joyful; the unhappy, disturbed, or violent mind is never still. Mindfulness, contemplation, meditation, and prayer are pathways to greater stillness.”

Kindness and goodness make us happier: selfishness and unkindness make us unhappy now or in the longer term.

Happiness is the experience of joy, contentment, or positive well-being, combined with a sense that one’s life is good, meaningful, and worthwhile.

According to Matthieu Ricard, “Happiness is a deep sense of flourishing, not a mere pleasurable feeling or fleeting emotion but an optimal state of being.”

What happiness is not

One must also understand what happiness is not.

According to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, “Happiness is not something that happens. It is not the result of good fortune or random chance.

“It is not something that money can buy or power command. It does not depend on outside events, but rather on how we interpret them.

“Happiness, in fact, is a condition that must be prepared for, cultivated, and defended privately by each person.

“People who learn to control inner experience will be able to determine the quality of their lives, which is as close as any one of us can come to being happy.”

“Happiness does not come automatically. It is not a gift that good fortune bestows upon us and a reversal of fortunes takes back. It depends on us alone.

“One does not become happy overnight, but with patient labour, day after day. Happiness is constructed, and that requires effort and time. In order to become happy, we have to learn how to change ourselves.”

Luca & Francesco Cavalli-Sforza

Well-Being

Martin Seligman, known as the father of positive psychology, developed the ‘PERMA’ model, which identifies the five things necessary for wellbeing – positive emotion (P), engagement (E), relationships (R), meaning (M) and achievement (A).

Well-being is a construct, and happiness is a thing. Just as weather is a construct of temperature, humidity, wind speed, barometric pressure, and some other factors; well-being is a construct of five factors, as under.

The five elements of well-being are:

• positive emotion,
• engagement,
• relationships,
• meaning,
• and accomplishment.

Positive Emotion includes the feelings of joy, excitement, contentment, hope, and warmth. There may be positive emotions relating to the past, present or future.

Engagement denotes deep involvement in a task or activity. One does not experience the passing of time. One experiences flow in sports, music, and singing but one may also experience it in work, reading a book, or in a good conversation.

We feel happy when we are among family and friends. The quality and depth of relationships in one’s life make it rich.

Meaning is connecting to something larger than life. 

One strives for achievements in life. They are a source of happiness for us.

Each of these elements contributes to well-being. The good news is that each one of the above may be cultivated and developed to enhance the level of well-being.

“If you observe a really happy man, you will find him building a boat, writing a symphony, educating his son, growing double dahlias in his garden, or looking for dinosaur eggs in the Gobi Desert.”

Walter Beran Wolfe