Your Personal Level of Happiness?

Have you ever been flooded over by life? Now I do not mean that you should have gone through any drastic and dramatic life changes. Neither do I mean feeling over-loaded. I mean normal days that somehow get filled up with comings and goings the combination of which rather resembles a cubistic painting than a Flemish still-life.

Today everything in this town has been framed by beautiful spring weather. Now we have light. Even after nine o´clock in the evening you can still see that light was present. Snow is melting rapidly. Going for a walk on the frozen lakes would be very risky. Skiing tracks in the forests won´t be back until next year.

Maybe the most memorable event today was a visit at my cousin´s. He has a big family. Their three and four-year-old sons were going out. If you have lived in the north, you know what it means to dress the children properly in winter. Often it takes time and effort. Sometimes you need to tell yourself that you are an adult person and you can decide to have good nerves.

"Imagine, every morning we need to find fourteen more or less similar pairs of socks." the boy´s mother laughed. She found two wellington boots - a blue one and a red one. "Are these all right?" she asked suggesting that they were a pair. The little one said simply "No." Finally one complete pair was found. All this happened without any signs of impatience and rush on either side.

"I´ll give you two euros, if you play with them here." mother said to the neighbour´s girl. The deal was done. We could talk business at the kitchen table.

Having come back the boys simply took off their clothes and went on with their games totally naked. "Our children start wearing clothes when they are five." their mother explained.

I wish I had been that kind of calm and non-rushing mother. I was not. I remember having been impatient and I certainly have rushed my children - and myself. I still keep on doing that. However, when children were small I tried to apologise in the evenings for all the obvious mistakes I had done during the day. Once having done that my daughter said: "Well, it´s all right. Anyway, it´s better to have a yelling mother than no mother at all." - All is relative and some things have a lasting effect.

Later in the evening the battery of my mobile phone went flat just when I was talking with my friends in Hungary. I had to wait for it to operate again. When a book catches your eye, you need to take it. Meanings of Life (ISBN: 0-89862-531-9) was sending special messages from the bookself. This is what I found in it:

"People believe that happiness depends on their immediate circumstances, and they often believe that changing the circumstances - as by getting out of an unhappy marriage - will bring about a major change in their level of happiness. But these beliefs appear to be wrong, or at least greatly exaggerated. Happiness remains fairly constant over the long run."

The author of Meanings of Life is Roy F. Baumeister. He cites research. A two-sentence summary of the adaption-level theory of happiness states that good and bad events have only a temporary effect on subjective feelings, which soon return to the baseline and people have different baselines. After any event, good or bad, happy people go back to being happy, while unhappy people go back to being unhappy.

Sometimes I feel worried about feeling worried. Once we were talking about things like that with teacher students. I said that to my mind the basic idea of the Christian religion is to liberate human beings from all worries and feeling worried is perhaps the biggest of all sins. "All sins are of the same size." somebody said. "One sin is not bigger or smaller than any other."

Well, we have t-shirts and blue jeans of various sizes, but would God really use scales and measures to determine the value of our shortcomings? Even that remains untold to us. You have to decide that yourself.