How to Be Happy

In her poem “The Suitor,” Jane Kenyon wrote a line that stops me short every time. It’s nestled there between stanzas, a short sentence crafted to stand alone between visual breaths.

“Suddenly, I understand that I am happy.”

Kenyon struggled with anxiety and depression throughout her short life, before succumbing to cancer in her mid-40s. Married to U.S. Poet Laureate Donald Hall, she spent many years in rural New Hampshire where she and Hall would write and read and garden and, at the end of a day’s work, challenge one another to ping pong.

Her poems describe her complicated relationship with faith, her concern over her mental health, her worries for a world that seemed both so breathtakingly beautiful and so profoundly a mess.

I’ve loved her words for years, and return to them time and again when I feel tremors in my own faith. She writes about God coming to comfort us at the moment of death, of bad advice from Christian friends, of the peace of a garden as the evening light shines across the leaves.

But it’s the line about happiness I return to the most.

Happiness is a puzzle to me, an enigma, a set of goalposts that seem to just keep moving a few more yards farther afield. My most recent book chronicles my own journey to embrace joy as a gift from God through avenues of playfulness.

Most folks who heard I was writing a book on happiness told me it sounded like a lot of fun, but a few got it.

“That sounds excruciating,” said my friend Bethany. “You can’t write about happiness if you haven’t walked through the valley of the shadow.”

In my research and writing, I discovered this to be true. Often the most playful, joyful souls were those who had experienced incredible suffering. They weren’t happy-go-lucky, but they were happy. They understood how very little was within their control. They enjoyed the present moment. They were less concerned with image and perception and more deeply rooted in faith and love.

Back in college, when my husband Daryl was still my boyfriend Daryl, we heard a sermon where the pastor mentioned that the beatitudes found in Matthew 5 were all about happiness. “Blessed can be translated as happy,” he told us.

“Blessed are the poor in spirit, or happy are they. Blessed are those who mourn, or happy are they.” (Matthew 5:3,4 NIV)

“That’s bananas,” I told Daryl, and we scurried back to my on-campus house to flip through our Greek concordance and prove him wrong.

“My word,” said Daryl, parsing the Greek. “He’s right!”

Wasn’t a happy mourner an oxymoron? Could someone truly be poor in spirit and yet filled with joy?

I’ve begun to discover that yes, they can.

In Anne’s House of Dreams, Anne’s fiancée, Gilbert, weds her with a pearl ring but hesitates about Anne’s decision to eschew a diamond.

“But pearls are for tears, the old legend says,” Gilbert objected.

“I’m not afraid of that. And tears can be happy as well as sad. My very happiest moments have been when I had tears in my eyes . . . I’ll willingly accept the sorrow of life with its joy.”

Happiness comes to us from the depths as we connect with God and our neighbor and ourselves, drilling down to the essences of life and love. Happiness comes to us in the curl on the back of a baby’s neck. It traverses on the fluttering wings of the orange Monarch searching for milkweed. It can be found in the marital bed and the hospital bed, around the campfire and at the edge of the tomb.

It isn’t in running from suffering that we find happiness, it’s in embracing the Lord and all the complexities of this life.

It comes from sitting still and breathing deeply, from a good meal, from a hot bath, from a cool breeze in wildfire season and fresh snow just before the morning sun.

It comes suddenly.

Let us understand.

Courtney Ellis is a speaker, pastor, and author of Happy Now: Let Playfulness Lift Your Load and Renew Your Spirit, Uncluttered: Free Your Space, Free Your Schedule, Free Your Soul, and Almost Holy Mama: Life-Giving Spiritual Practices for Weary Parents. A resident of California, she and her co-pastor husband have three kids. Together they hike the brush-covered hills, plant veggies, seek wisdom, and embrace hope. You can find her on Twitter, on Facebook, or at www.courtneybellis.com.