Happiness

Recently two items jumped up on our internet home page. One was "Americans are not happy." The other was a question from a Time article, "Can the American marriage be saved?" These two things have been going around and around in my head ever since. I think the answer can be found, at least partially, in the fact that we as a nation have forgotten how to wait.

I am as guilty as the next. I find it taxing when there is someone ahead of me on the rare occasion that I go to the bank. I resist the urge to tap my foot as I watch the teller count money, answer questions, and finally move the person who has impeded my progress out of the way. I shake my head with all of you when I approach the long line of checkout stations at Wally World and find all closed except the one with the line gathering numbers as I push my cart into line.

Unfortunately impratience pervades our lives in ways that are more serious than our fuming in line. We see it in the quick decision to toss a marriage aside if we "are just not happy anymore." We see it financially when we can't wait to save for something we can't live without and run up credit card bills that we will never have the ability to pay. We see it in the number of people who buy more house than they can afford. We see it in people who want everything now. We see it in a sense of entitlement.

What is particularly sad in all of this is that we are robbing ourselves of blessings and joys which come with anticipation, dreams, and plans. When we get too much, too often, too soon, we lose a part of what makes life fun. We change our level of expectation, often to the point that there is simply nothing that can satisfy us. We lose the simplicity of living.

Let's look a little at some of life's waits. Babies take time. From the time we know they are coming until they appear, we have about nine months of anticipation. Of course with modern technology, the parents no longer wait to know whether "it" is a boy or girl. Now, by five months in, the baby is named. It all takes away a little of the wonder and anticipation, but in their place, we can color coordinate wardrobes and get everything monogramed.

Bringing up children still involves a lot of waiting as we watch the little helpless baby turn into the toddler, the child, the preteeen, the teen, and then an adult. We see efforts to circumvent some of these steps as we watch four years old dress and mimic teen stars.

Good bread takes time. First the yeast must flower. Then the dough must rise and be punched down and shaped. Then, there is the second rising. Only then are the loaves placed in the hot oven and the payoff, smells of baking bread, waft through the house during the last wait until it comes out of the oven. Yes, bread can be purchased, but the pleasure of smelling the bread as it bakes and slicing off that first piece to be covered in butter and eaten can not come from a loaf of bought bread.

A tomato picked from the garden from a plant put in the ground three months earlier, watered, and cared for is another sweet reward in life. A garden eaten with the warmth of the sun still on it is an all together different joy from a tomato picked green and shipped to market where it is gassed and turned red.

Our lives have been enriched by the conveniences of modern America, but when we allow ourselves to become slaves to the things and the pursuit of things, we lose too much of the joy in learning to live. We are often so busy in our going and our doing and our pursuit of fun, that the joy of living day in and day out escapes us.

That is sad; that is very sad.