A declaration of happiness is better done than described

“The pursuit of happiness”; it’s the final right in a list of the three inalienable rights that arguably defines and justifies the point and desire for the Declaration of Independence.

It is not difficult to understand why the “preservation of life and liberty” are the first two — they aspire to man’s wants for safety, protection, freedom from persecution, independence of thought and worship, those tangible and intangible needs that can be fulfilled by the structure of a guiding set of principles and laws, of even the most loosely defined government.

But what about happiness? What does that have to do with government, policy or laying out a roadmap for a fledgling nation? Why does a term that is all about emotion, mental disposition and the language of the heart find its way into a blueprint for nation-building?

Maybe it has no place, or maybe happiness is a concept so difficult to describe with any weight and nuance that Thomas Jefferson himself didn’t understand it. I certainly don’t understand its place in the Declaration of Independence any more than I can describe it with any certainty 240 years later for myself or in the context of my country.

Although “life” and “liberty” appears together in the 17th century writings of philosopher John Locke — believed to be Jefferson’s inspiration for the Declaration of Independence — the third piece is almost always “property,” something Jefferson would obviously want to shy away from when the intent was to break away from Mother England over excessive taxation of property, among other things.

Happiness would seem to be the logical desire for the subjects of a crushing monarchy, but it’s a difficult emotion and idea to pin down with any accuracy. It is conceptually vague, light, airy. Unlike the state of sadness, despair, anger, frustration; these are white hot emotions that drive us further into the ground or to rise up and break apart the chains of oppression, by outside forces or internal struggles.

Happiness is not part of the emotional vocabulary of many people. Time and again I find myself wondering: Why do I have such a hard time describing happiness? What is so difficult about truly explaining joy? Why do I often feel like my grip on sadness and anger to be so visceral, so colorful and vivid, and my grasp of life’s treasures and simple pleasures so hazy and uncertain, so obscure?

For someone who writes, these are concerns, because you tend to write what you know, and if your dictionary is light on positivity yet a veritable thesaurus of negativity, that doesn’t just come through in who you are as a person but how you tackle every subject, comment on every issue.

Love and joy, almost anything and everything that lifts us up and is transcendent is defined in words, phrases and metaphors that feel light; not inconsequential but ethereal. It’s as if happiness is made up of big, intangible thoughts floating out of our grasp, never captured long enough to be analyzed for the right descriptors.

Yet, ask a person to describe what it is that is bothering them, why they don’t like someone or something. Ask them to articulate their anger and resentments and fears. The words we’ll use have gravity, they stick to the bones, churn hot and acidic in the belly, stand cold and dark and heavy, immovable enough that we can pore over them in wretched detail.

Maybe Thomas Jefferson knew what many modern psychologists have really begun to understand and communicate to people like me: happiness is not an emotion to be understood, or a feeling to be described; rather, it’s an action word, something that must be attained through work and effort, through acts of charity and selflessness.

Sadness and despair, anger and pain, these are concepts that keep us immobile, standing in place or running in circles, getting nowhere. These are the emotions and feelings exerted upon us.

Jefferson understood, perhaps, that men striving for freedom would take action, do something transformative for themselves, for each other, for the good of a nation, through guiding principles and policies. The end product of happiness would not be the state of being, but the state of trying.

Grabbing hold of the language of anger will always be easier than grasping the language of joy. One requires inactive introspection, and the other just doesn’t have time for all that drama.

This column first appeared in the Imperial Valley Press, Oct. 3, 2014.