Being Happy by Being Ordinary

I love Settlers of Catan. Recently I was playing and one of my opponents did something really odd. I expressed my confusion because I’m accustomed to playing with people who play ‘by the book’. Her response was, “You have to loosen up; free your mind; and do your own thing.”

This is the kind of talk is one of my special weaknesses. When people say foolish, romantic, new age sounding clap chap like this, I often to get frustrated and show that I think they’re being foolish. So I said, “‘The Book’ is usually ‘The Book’ because it is logically and scientifically the best approach, tested by experience, and virtually always the best way to go. That’s why it’s ‘The Book’.” My wife always asks why I can’t keep that kind of thing to myself.

But this issue opens to the wider idea of the old conflict between romantic improvisation and empirical prudence in the discussion of life lived out. David Wells in the book No Place for Truth noted that in the early 1800’s all manuals for happiness were explorations of morality. That is because it was widely believed that the most normal and reliable way to be consistently happy is to be moral. And this meant that being happy included, for the most part, being normal- or ordinary- at least in moral/happiness discussion. This is all the more relevant when we note that, at least in the early 1800’s, most of life’s decisions were seen as moral decisions. And so being happy was the result of the ordinary and predictable application of empirically verified rules of moral or prescribed life. Anyone was free to be creative and romantic within the bounds of these moral guides, but the approved plan was to find happiness within the structure and not through rebellion against, or in spite of, it.

This week I finally got around to watching some of the film American Beauty (a little late I know). I got a little workout holding up the remote control so as to avoid seeing anyone’s nipples. I did see Kevin Spacey’s, but that’s not the point. Anyhow, the two great themes I noticed were: Dissatisfaction with materialism (a one dimensional caricature of the prudent life- ie. That prudent, moral people may be winners but there is no beauty in it, and beauty is what we really need to be happy) and the way people react to unhappiness. Agreed, that this is not what the film is really ‘about’, but I find as a Christian I am more interested in the semi-conscious themes in films like this than in what the ‘answer’ is in what the film is ‘doing’. I find what filmmakers are doing instinctively and intuitively usually more interesting than what they are doing intentionally and explicitly. Again, not the point.

In one of the late themes between Kevin Spacey and Mena Suvari (aka- the hot blonde teenage cheerleader) is that one of her character’s greatest fears is to be ‘ordinary’. This is a description given by one of the most dramatically dysfunctional characters, who is apparently not ‘ordinary’ for virtually all negatively dysfunctional and immoral reasons. But when she cannot be hurt by anything he says, he pulls this out- ‘You’re ordinary!’ He knows it will hurt her; that this may be the thing she fears most. In fact she fears it so much that she attempts to have sex for her first time with the middle aged, married father of her teenage friend in a desperate attempt to prove otherwise by giving herself to the man willing to comfort her by saying she couldn’t be ordinary if she tried. (By the way: Subplot- moral people don’t get to have sex, so, think it over)

As absurd as this is on paper, within a film like this, given the right set of circumstances, I could be Lester (Spacey), and I know it. The reversal to the non-moral, non-normal, only-unique way of being happy grows each day unconsciously. It seems our imagination is always more vivid than what our senses can absorb of the real moments we are in. And if our moral imagination is impotent to magnify what our real senses can absorb, the steady pull of an imagined otherness seems exotically magnetic. You can’t convince such a man that the grass isn’t actually greener and that blondes don’t really have more fun just because they get more attention. How does one learn that quality doesn’t come form the combination of quantity and variation?

Yet since this rejection of ordinary happiness is not conscious or reflective, we can’t normally fight it. We simply respond to ‘moral living’ with a growing, nameless fear that makes us feel desperate for something else. And as this ripens, we come to resent the moral guides and responsibilities. We slowly come to bitterly see them as guards keeping us from being happy instead of as guides to keep us in the way of ordinary happiness. And once this is complete, it doesn’t much matter what the ‘morals’ are- they cause the same effect. And so we become adept at seeing their ‘genealogy’, and more and more we ‘see through’ them in an attempt to be free of them, though there is nothing opaque behind their supposed transparency for us to see. The beauty beyond isn’t really there. We have peered through the garden to see the quarry.

And all the while we distance ourselves from God’s greatest gift that sin and devils have hidden in plane sight. Meanwhile we chase the fairy of happiness who can only been met by those not looking for her, but who always appears when one is looking for a certain something else. It will take us great boldness to believe that we might be happy by being in a family, receiving children, working hard, serving others and taking joy in the things of hearth and home. The ordinary life is a life for those who can celebrate and enjoy life as it is, those who have forsaken the need to make it something else to make it something good.

If we can embrace the Christian vision of ordinary happiness and embrace being a husband, or wife, parent and worker, we will begin again to find joy in the things we thought kept us from the joy of leisure, hobby and amusement. And in taking joy in good and ordinary things we will begin to find happiness a more normal state and the things we must do done all the better.