Hapless and Happy

 

hapless - adjective - unfortunate, unlucky (Google).

Perhaps because January is a bit of a downer, the topic of happiness is in the news. Recent articles in The New York Times and in Time magazine dissect the abstract concept, whittling it down to its basic components, which I am sure to get to before I'm through writing. 

As one article in Time mentions, the word happiness contains "hap" or "luck" within it. So "happy" is someone who is full of luck; whereas "hapless" points to someone who is unlucky. Not everyone is happy or lucky all of the time unless you happen to be a Buddhist monk. (I have never met one who wasn't overflowing with bliss.) But can you be a hapless person and still be happy most of the time? 

I'd say yes because I am a definitive example. I've lived a life comparable to that of Sisyphus in that I have kept on pushing that boulder (analogous to effort) up the hill, only for it to come rolling back down again. It is not as though I am a total failure; I am not. I just haven't had the kind of luck that takes control of the boulder and stabilizes it at the top of the hill that is the epic grandeur of what everyone except Emerson deems as success. Which doesn't mean that I am not happy. I own all of the ingredients mentioned in Emerson's definition and in the news articles: I have health, family, myriad friends, freedom to do a creative job I love, enough in the bank to pay my bills, time to exercise, meditate, garden, and pray.  All of these give me the strength to endure the unlucky moments, such as when I was driving through a canyon in Montana and a pebble fell from 9,000 feet and cracked the windshield of a BMW I was borrowing from someone. These freak occurrences surely fall under the nomenclature of "Bad Luck" or "Hapless." Yet, the contented person in me always tends to look on the bright side in order to stay out of the funk. What landed on the windshield could have been a moose and not a pebble, in which case I wouldn't be writing this right now. 

So what's the takeaway? Yes, you can be hapless and still be happy or lucky but not necessarily all that happy. In the U.S., we have documents protecting our right to pursue happiness. It is out there for all, even the Sisyphuses who are constantly watching their toes while pushing their loads up those mounds. Haplessness could come down to fate. Happiness, like most everything else, could just be mindset and a choice. 

#word-to-words, #slice-of-life, #literature, #blog, #blogging, #religion, #editorial, #reading, #vocabulary, #history, #ReadersMagnet, #spilled thoughts, #good advice, #personal-essay, #writing community, #writing