How to be happy when things are so rotten
Visiting my happy place, strolling among the shells and boulders, and being reminded that we're all just walking each other home.
On Monday, feeling a bit displaced and down, I took a stroll at my happy place, an inspirational promontory nearby called Meigs Point, which juts into Long Island Sound from Hammonasset Beach, where hundreds of species come to live, and where enormous piles of boulders, deposited by melting glaciers eons ago, and thousands upon thousands of shelled marine animals have come to lie together for eternity - at least until nature moves them again - crushed by the Atlantic tides and waves of human footsteps.
But I’m the only one there on this cold, crisp December morning.
This is the refuse of God’s teeming shore, the debris that time has brought and deposited here: hundreds of boulders, the residue of those retreating glaciers, seesawing back and forth, Hamlet-like in their inability to figure out where to settle (they picked a good place), and the mounds of crushed shells, too many to count.
The shells seem to be calling to me, their hollowed openings looking like mouths agape as if to memorialize a final breath.
Stripped of life but not of presence, and far from shriveled, decay does not accompany death for these mini-mollusks, but rather, it brings a stunning, permanent beauty.
Ram Dass said, “We’re all just walking each other home,” and as I walked on these shells, I sensed that they were escorting me, that I was standing on their shoulders. I reflected back on a year when my mortality was most keenly felt, and I felt the crunch of thousands of crushed marine animals under my feet. I felt that they were holding me up, as I chose to play out the last (hopefully lengthy) chapters of my earthly journey in the place where they ended theirs. I only hope my legacy looks as lovely, and is as lasting, as theirs.
I imagined them fighting against the tide, struggling madly before succumbing. But even as these creatures give up and land on the shore, they gather there in the thousands, refusing to lie alone.
Maybe it’s better just to let the tide take us. Not to resist, to struggle so madly.
Or perhaps, despite the inevitability of the destination, the struggle is still necessary for some inexplicable reason.
I feel that drift so much more acutely now. I came to the shoreline to let the tide take me.
And there I am, standing among the boulders, who bow toward the ocean while nearby trees bend from it, fending off the relentless New England coastal winds.
And there I am, a speck of clay brought to life in a speck of time.
But then I look down, in the bright morning wintry sun, standing atop the rocks and shells, as if growing out of them, and of course we all did, as we emerged from the sea.
And I suddenly feel as if maybe this speck within a speck might have some meaning, some purpose, something to live for. Some significance.
I feel…big.
And so, as we prepare to usher out our annus horribiles (and really, it’s hard to imagine a worse year) (OK 2023) (2020 too) (1942…) (OK there have been many worse years), there are lots of reasons to be anxious right now, but lots of reasons to be hopeful too. And to be hopeful is to be happy.
As bad as things seem, we should still look for ways to be happy, especially as we enter a month replete with joyous holidays for people of many different backgrounds.
Here are some tips on how we can lift our own spirits, and others’ too.
In the words of Psalm 34:
An alternate translation of that initial verse:
“Who is the one who seeks life, embraces every day and sees the good?”
That person, the one whose outlook is imbued with hope - who sees the glass as half full - who pursues life and seeks peace, that is the person who is truly happy.
And so, as a Jew, I humbly ask: How could such a glass-half-full religion be gifted to such a glass-half-empty people, one that refuses to take “Yes!” for an answer, one that refuses to “see the good?”
Yes, things are less than optimal right now. But as we head into 2026, when existential elections will determine the fate of the two countries I most care about, I’ve seen enough to know two things:
1) The embers of antisemitism and all forms of hate will never be completely snuffed out. They always emerge, on the right and on the left. Just as the “idea” of Hamas can never be truly destroyed in Gaza. With support, however, hate can be held at bay - that’s what happened in Germany after the Holocaust. Still, we’ve managed to thrive in uncertain times before, and we can again.
2) Elections matter. A fortuitous change of governments, or at least the balance of power, in the US and in Israel, could make all the difference. Not that lions will suddenly lie down with lambs, but we’ve seen before - just a few of years ago in both countries - that changes in government can instantly reframe the conversations in much more positive directions. Taking the temperature down a few degrees won’t solve all our problems completely, but it certainly would help, empowering forces for stability, reason and tolerance that can help to bend that arc toward justice.
I am a great believer in the “Great Person” theory of history. Leaders matter, both positively and negatively, and if we didn’t know that before, we know it now. Some damage cannot be undone, but the fact that individuals can make such a difference means much damage can be reversed. I do believe the damage to liberal democracy can be repaired, with levels of hate and corruption reduced significantly and justice pursued and regenerated, and I am hopeful that it will in 2026.
But the first thing we need to do is seek our happy place, to groud ourselves there, and begin to find our place in eternity, among the boulders and the shells.
Keys to a Life of Happiness
One of my favorite sermons was on the topic of happiness. Here is the audio:
In that sermon, I shared ten keys to a life of happiness. Here are a few of them. I hope they will help all of us to navigate these hard times with a little more hope.
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Nachman of Bratzlav said, “If you are not happy, pretend to be.
Even if you are totally depressed, act happy. Genuine joy will follow.” This one might leave you skeptical, but Reb Nachman believed that when we activate joy, it ignites a spark inside us, it opens up our aliveness and lets us see the world from a God’s eye view. As Rabbi Mark Novak put it, “Putting on a smile is not intended to cover over anything, but to make room for what is here – the divine presence – in each breathing, sacred moment. The smile, which leads us to joy, which leads us to wonder, calls upon the child within us to live with curiosity and creativity.”
Rabbi Nachman of Bratzlav understood, way before Freud, that sadness can lead to sickness.
Nachman himself struggled deeply with depression. Aristotle called happiness “the chief good,” the end towards which all other things aim. And in full agreement, Moses Chayim Luzzato, who in the 18th century wrote “The Path of the Just,” begins the first chapter saying, “The human is created to take pleasure.” For him, there was no greater pleasure than seeking closeness with God.
Laugh your way through the tears.
Henny Youngman put it in the form of a joke: says “I go to the doctor and the doctor says I have six months to live. I told him I can’t pay him. So he gave me six months more.” That is the quintessential Jewish joke. We all have six months. We’re all up against literally a dead-line. But if we can laugh at it and stand up to it, it will give us a reprieve from the sadness – and that’s like bargaining for six months more. What else can we do in the face of death but laugh at it?
Cultivate He-sed-ic Communities by Caring for Others
Not Hasidic – but Hesed-ic. Communities filled with Hesed (lovingkindness). Rabbi Israel Salanter, the 19th century founder of the Mussar movement, saw a scholar with a forlorn look on his face during the days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. The scholar said he was worried because these are the days when God is judging us. To which Salanter replied, “But other people won’t realize that that’s what’s bothering you. They might think that you are upset with them. In order to be truly happy, we’ve truly got to care about the happiness of others.
A while back, PBS aired a film called “Happy,” tracking the phenomenon all over the world. The producer spoke about how he had heard that happy people tend to be healthier, get sick less often and live longer than unhappy people – and that for some reason, the oldest people in the world came from Okinawa in Japan.
He went there on a whim and found that it was a resounding YES, they were happy. The key was how different generations come together on a regular basis. One day, he noticed a group of elderly women visiting a preschool as the kids were having a footrace. The grandmothers convened at finish line. They hugged all the kids as they finished. The producer went to congratulate a grandmother about having such a grandkid.
She said, ‘That’s not my grandchild. None of these are my grandkids.’ She was asked, ‘Is this your friend’s?’ She said, ‘None of the women here are related to any of these children.’
Build a Happy Wall
In a big square in Copenhagen, there is an enormous interactive wooden pixel screen called the Happy Wall. When I first saw it, I said to myself: Perfect: We’ve got the Wailing Wall and the Scandinavians have the Happy Wall. That’s just the way it is. But as I drew closer to the Happy Wall, it drew me in. There are 2000 wooden boards of all different colors, and people are invited to write messages or create patterns, animals, words or statements grouping many of the boards.
I looked at some of the messages close up.
“Happy marriage for 30 years: Andrea and Gunnar.”
“My family is my everything: Isabel.”
“M.L: The answer is yes.”
Now I’ve never read the messages that people put into the Kotel, but the messages I saw on the Happy Wall were probably very similar – only happier. At the Happy Wall we might see, “I love my great aunt Sylvia’s potato blintzes more than life itself. I’ll love her forever.”
At the Kotel we might see, “My great aunt Sylvia was bitten by a mosquito in the back yard. Please keep her from dying of malaria.”
The messages at both walls are about caring about something beyond ourselves. And that’s what make us happy. It’s Hesed. It’s unconditional love, the kind of love that makes not only makes forgiveness possible – it makes it inevitable. It’s warm puppy happiness.
I realized that, in the end, we’re just a bunch of boys and girls (and nonbinary folks too), standing in front of the world, asking it to love us.
Embracing our brokenness, focusing on the here and now, laughing through our tears, accepting our flaws, removing the masks, cultivating kindness, letting anger go, smiling even when we don’t feel it, coming together to celebrate and cry with community. That’s what makes us happy.
Live Your Second Life.
I’m not talking about “Second Life,” the online virtual world followed by a million people.
I’m talking about something that was said by Steven Sotloff, the American Jew (and Israeli citizen too,) whose experience was all too real. Before he was so brutally murdered by ISIS, he was able to smuggle home a few correspondences when former cellmates were freed. He wrote this letter that was read by his aunt at his funeral, before a hushed congregation:
“Please know I’m OK.” He said. “Live your life to the fullest and fight to be happy. Everyone has two lives. The second one begins when you realize you only have one.”
If Steven Sotloff could fight to be happy where he was, we have no reason to give in to despair back here. He was the embodiment of that rabbinic dictum that we must repent on the last day of our lives. And since we don’t know when that will be, so must we repent each and every day.
When you realize that you have only one life, you will fight to be happy.
For those of us created in the divine image, i.e. all of us, we must do nothing less. We must fight to be happy by marshaling the forces of steadfast kindness to prevail inside of us. We must find a way to let go and forgive. We must find a way to hug someone else’s child. We must find a way to laugh through the tears.
Then, when we’ve done all that, we’ll have arrived at our own happy place, and our legacy will be as lasting and as beautiful as those shells and boulders on the shore.
Addendum: For those who are interested, here’s the background to how those boulders got to Meigs Point, from the sign overlooking them. Fascinating!
Josh, Michele and I are going through some difficult times. I found your reaction to your struggles inspiring! Barry
Thank you for this great inspiration. Will pass it on.