We keep a cartoon-a-day calendar in our kitchen. The best laugh last week came from a drawing of two dogs having a conversation. One pooch stands with a ball in his mouth. The other is sitting, his ball in front of him. The empty-mouthed Fido asks his pal, “Are you happy with your current ball?”
The cartoon came on the heels of my reading about a new kind of professional whose services help clients figure out how to be happy. This professional is called a “wantologist.” (I am not making this up.). Imagine the woman who thought she wanted a bigger house. Her wantologist helped her figure out that what she really wanted was a place where she could feel peace. She stayed put and decorated a small room with lots of ferns and a table top fountain which makes bubbling sounds. [Full disclosure: I have a little bubbly-sounding fountain too. Yes, peaceful.]
Could our beloved Atlanta benefit from the services of an urban wantologist? Are we happy with our city as it is, or are there things we wish for, things we wish were different, the beautiful fountains in Centennial Olympic Park notwithstanding? For example, is the proposed billion dollar football stadium a “must have”, or are we happy enough with our current stadium? Are we happy with the quality of our air and water? With the standard of our life together? Now would be a good time to think about what we really want, what we really need to be a great city. Surely, the great cities of tomorrow will be those that remember that the needs of the least are to be considered alongside the needs of the prosperous. Tomorrow’s great cities will invite public spaces, unclogged roadways, clean air and fresh water. The great cities will be communities where children can grow and thrive, where seniors are honored, where families of all types are respected and supported. They will be places in which greed and fear are not allowed to poison the atmosphere. Civic happiness will always be about opportunity, mutuality, industriousness, and compassion. Civic happiness will always come as a consequence of adhering to values that make us rise up in goodness rather than sink down into the muck of meanness.
Could you and I benefit from the services of a personal wantologist? Do you know what you really want? A lot of us are enslaved by a must have list of things that we really do not need. A lot of us have personal goals toward which we are working, but are they bringing us what we truly want? Are they the right goals in the sense of being aligned with God’s purpose for our lives? I am pretty sure that happiness itself ought never to be our life’s goal. Happiness comes as a by-product of being caught up in something larger than ourselves.
Happiness is about life right now. Happiness comes from lining yourself up with the good you know. Happiness comes from knowing that God is the center of the universe, and you are not.
Obviously, happiness does not require the services of a professional happiness expert. It simply asks us to be open when it emerges in unexpected places, “the hitchhiker” along our life’s way. Poet Jane Kenyon puts it like this:
. . .happiness is the uncle you never
knew about, who flies a single engine plane
onto a grassy landing strip, hitchhikes
into town, and inquires at every door
until he finds you asleep midafternoon
as you so often are during the unmerciful
hours of your despair.
Rev. Joanna