Introduction
My bags were packed and provisions loaded. I was ready for adventure. And
so, on a late summer afternoon, I dragged my reluctant friend Drew off to
explore new worlds and, I hoped, find some happiness along the way. I’ve
always believed that happiness is just around the corner. The trick is
finding the right corner.
Not long into our journey, Drew grew nervous. He pleaded with me to turn
back, but I insisted we press on, propelled by an irresistible curiosity
about what lay ahead. Danger? Magic? I needed to know, and to this day I’m
convinced I would have reached wherever it was I was trying to reach had
the Baltimore County Police not concluded, impulsively I thought at the
time, that the shoulder of a major thoroughfare was no place for a couple
of five-year-olds.
Some people acquire the travel bug. Others are born with it. My
affliction, if that’s what it is, went into remission for many years
following my aborted expedition with Drew. It resurfaced after college
with renewed fury. I desperately wanted to see the world, preferably on
someone else’s dime. But how? I had no marketable skills, a stunted sense
of morality and a gloomy disposition. I decided to become a journalist.
As a foreign correspondent for National Public Radio, I traveled to places
like Iraq, Afghanistan and Indonesia. Unhappy places. On one level, this
made perfect sense. Unconsciously, I was observing the first law of
writing: Write about what you know. And so, notebook in hand, tape
recorder slung over my shoulder, I roamed the world telling the stories of
gloomy, unhappy people. The truth is that unhappy people, living in
profoundly unhappy places, make for good stories. They tug at heart
strings and inspire pathos.
They can also be a real bummer.
What if, I wondered, I spent a year traveling the globe seeking out not
the world’s well-trodden trouble spots but, rather, its unheralded happy
places? Places that possess, in spades, one or more of the ingredients
that we consider essential to the hearty stew of happiness: money,
pleasure, spirituality, family, chocolate, among others. Around the world,
dozens of what-ifs play themselves out every day. What if you lived in a
country that was fabulously wealthy and no one paid taxes? What if you
lived in a country where failure is an option? What if you lived in a
country so democratic you voted eight times a year? What if you lived in a
country where excessive thinking is discouraged? Would you be happy then?
That’s exactly what I intended to find out, and the result of this
admittedly harebrained experiment is the book you now hold in your hands.
I was born in the Year of the Smiley Face: 1963. That’s when a graphic
designer from Worcester, Massachusetts named Harvey Ball invented the now
ubiquitous yellow grinning graphic. Originally, Ball’s creation was
designed to cheer up people who worked at, of all places, an insurance
company, but it has since become synonymous with the frothy,
quintessentially American brand of happiness.
Ball’s cheery icon never worked its magic on me. I am not a happy person,
never have been. As a child, my favorite Winnie-the-Pooh character was
Eeyore.
For most of human history, I would be considered normal. Happiness, in
this life, on this Earth, was a prize reserved for the gods and the
fortunate few. Today, though, happiness is not only considered possible
for anyone to attain, it is expected. Thus I, and millions of others,
suffer from the uniquely modern malady that historian Darrin McMahon calls
“the unhappiness of not being happy.” It is no fun at all.
And so, like many others, I’ve worked at it. I never met a self-help book
I didn’t like. My bookshelf is a towering, teetering monument to
existential angst, brimming with books informing me that happiness lies
deep inside of me. If I’m not happy, they counsel, then I’m not digging
deep enough.
This axiom of the self-help industrial complex is so deeply ingrained as
to be self-evident. There’s only one problem: It’s not true. Happiness is
not inside of us, but out there. Or, to be more precise, the line between
out there and in here is not as sharply defined as we think.
The late Harvard professor Alan Watts, in one of his wonderful lectures on
Eastern philosophy, used this analogy: “If I draw a circle, most people,
when asked what I have drawn, will say I have drawn a circle or a disc, or
a ball. Very few people will say I’ve drawn a hole in the wall, because
most people think of the inside first, rather than thinking of the
outside. But actually these two sides go together-you cannot have what is
‘in here’ unless you have what is ‘out there.'”
In other words, where we are is vital to who we are.
By “where,” I’m speaking not only of our physical environment but also our
cultural environment. Culture is the sea we swim in. So pervasive, so all
consuming, that we fail to notice its existence until we step out of it.
It matters more than we think.
With our words, we subconsciously conflate geography and happiness. We
speak of searching for happiness, of finding contentment, as if these were
locations in an atlas, actual places that we could visit if only we had
the proper map and the right navigational skills. Anyone who has taken a
vacation to, say, some Caribbean island and had flash through their mind
the uninvited thought “I could be happy here” knows what I mean.
The word lurking just behind the curtain is, of course, that tantalizing,
slippery concept known as paradise. It has beguiled us humans for some
time now. Plato imagined the Blessed Isles, a place where happiness flowed
like the warm Mediterranean waters. Until the 18th century, people
believed that Biblical paradise, the Garden of Eden, was a real place. It
appeared on maps, located, ironically, at the confluence of the Tigris and
Euphrates Rivers in what is now modern-day Iraq.
European explorers prepared for expeditions in search of paradise by
learning Aramaic, the language Jesus spoke. I set out on my journey, my
search for paradise, speaking not Aramaic but another obscure language,
the modern liturgy of bliss spoken by the new apostles of the emerging
science of happiness. I brush up on terms like “positive affect” and
“hedonic adaptation.” I carry no Bible, just a few Lonely Planet guides
and a conviction that, as Henry Miller said, “One’s destination is never a
place, but a new way of seeing things.”
And so, on a typically steamy day in Miami (itself some people’s concept
of paradise), I pack my bags and depart my home on what I know full well
is a fool’s errand, every bit as foolish as the one I tried to pull off as
a peripatetic five-year-old. As the author Eric Hoffer put it, “The search
for happiness is one of the chief sources of unhappiness.” That’s okay.
I’m already unhappy. I have nothing to lose.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from The Geography of Bliss
by Eric Weiner
Copyright © 2007 by Eric Weiner .
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Twelve
Copyright © 2007
Eric Weiner
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-446-58026-7
