Metaphor 1 - Music as a Metaphor for Happiness

Consider music. Why do we listen to music? We listen to music because there is, somewhere in the notes, a divine moment, possibly several moments, in which we are taken out of ourselves and all our daily concerns of living and raised up to an ethereal place in our minds where a point-event occurs in our souls that we call "happiness." We can call it a lot of other things, depending on who we are: "fun," "cool," "groovy," "a blast," "felicity," etc, etc. For simplicities sake, I will call it plain old happiness.

But if you listen to music carefully, you’ll notice that not every strain of a song, or every note of a composition gives you that specific point-event in the soul. In fact, if you listen carefully, you’ll notice that a lot of music is about preparation for that point-event, rather than the point-event itself. The point-event is in fact quite small and very fleeting, and the preparation leading up to it makes up most of the song or the composition. It is this point-event quality that I take as being the characteristic of happiness in general.

Even if you are not a music lover, I’m sure you recognize the nature of that fleetingness I have pointed out. There are many things in life that we derive a measure of happiness from that involves a lot of preparation in comparison to how long the happiness of the thing lasts. Think about the card game, where there was waiting around for the guys (or gals) to show up, and then the amount of time spent talking and shuffling and dealing, and then the brief fleeting moments of happiness from points being made or from the chats with the guys (or gals), all of which are gone once the cards are back in the deck and the deck is put away and everybody goes home.

Think about the fishing trip where one spent time selecting were to do it at, possibly getting reservations for the venue, preparing the rod and reels, the bait, monitoring the weather reports, clearing the calendar to able to take the time, etc. etc. Then one does the fishing. One takes enjoyment from it. But how much of being there is really happiness, and how many moments of time were spent preparing for it in comparison to the moments of happiness experienced? You can notice this about virtually any hobby there is.

Then there is the larger happiness that comes from the events in a career or even a life. Now, I hope that you have seen more than one fleeting moment of happiness in your life, but if you care to think about it a little (and I’ll understand if maybe you don’t) , you will find that in the long run of a life or a career, you may have gotten the feeling that as far as happiness is concerned, there’s been a lot more buck spent than bang received.

You may have worked hard and long on projects that gave you happiness after their completion, but found the happiness lasted only a day or two. You may have been an athlete who had trained really hard for the big contest, won the prize, and then realized your satisfaction in the prize has lasted maybe an hour or a day. You may be in a career in which a lot of hard work was punctuated from time to time by the happiness of a promotion that lasted only a day and night. You maybe living a life in which your happiest moments are a few pages in a scrap book.

And some of you may have noticed that what happiness you’ve had in life has been due to blind chance rather that design. You are not deceived in that regard. In the dictionary, the word "happiness" is said to derive from "hap," the archaic Scandinavian word for "luck" or "chance."

In fact, one sad aspect of happiness is that if we really notice it, and then set out to make it our goal, the act of having it as a goal may be the very thing that will prevent us from experiencing it. And God help us if some untoward event "spoils" our attempt at getting a flash of happiness from something. Some of the books on happiness will in fact tell you that the best way to get it is to ignore it completely and just go about your business. But that can be maddening advice to follow when happiness bobs up once in a while and then vanishes as fast as it came.

Now you may think "So happiness is fleeting. Big deal. So what? I’ll just go after it more and more until I get it again and again." But you should consider, first, that some kinds of happiness do not lend themselves to constant repetition. There are only so many times you can listen to a CD tract without the point-events of happiness eventually draining out of it and actual boredom setting in.

Second you should consider that whole categories of happiness may exhaust themselves when you eventually realize how much alike they are in end. For example, you may get happiness from reading Sherlock Holmes, or Nero Wolf, or Ellery Queen. But eventually you reach the point where you see that the entire mystery genre is based on the principle of a tricky observation being wrapped around some plot devices designed to conceal it until the last paragraph. There after it becomes harder to read a mystery just for the mysteries sake. (The best mystery stories are the ones that contain observations about the human condition as well as just the mystery plot). Once you understand the operating principal behind a happiness, it becomes harder to get a flash of happiness from a instance of the genre.

Thirdly, when you were a child, your parents footed the bill for you quest for happiness. But now that you are an adult, you pay for it by working. If you haven’t realized it by now, as you get older, the ratio of fun to work decreases as work becomes more and more demanding and one happiness after another is exhausted.

There are no two ways about it. We must solve the problem of happiness. The frenzied search for it is what makes this wicked old world go ‘round and ‘round, and is the source of much positive unhappiness. We have to solve it.

So we ask the obvious question "what makes happiness so fleeting?" And our second metaphor comes to our aid.