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Contentment, Happiness, and My Family

by Nina 

“I know what house my house will be. It will be just right for me. And a house just right for me must have a fireplace inside, daisies in the yard, cows in the pasture, and, most important, a friend near by.” —from Boats Finds a House by Mary Chalmers 

When my brother was a kid, his very favorite book “Boats Finds a House” was about cat that embarks on a search for his perfect home. The cat, Boats, has a very specific list what is needed to make him happy. And it takes a long while for Boats to find his house. He looks at many, many houses and can’t find one that’s just right, which makes him feel discouraged and sad. Of course, in the end, with some help from various friends, he does find the perfect house. 

“It really was just the right house for Boats and he lived happily ever after.” 

I’m not sure whether this book spoke so strongly to brother because of who he already was or whether he was actually inspired by the book, but my brother’s life ended up being a lot like Boat’s life. He, too, had a very specific idea of what the perfect house and life would be for him, and he has spent his whole life searching for it, even traveling to many different parts of the world in his search. But, unlike Boats, though he looked and looked, he still hasn’t found his perfect house and life, and now he’s in his early sixties and at a very low point indeed. 

When I was telling a close friend of our family about this, she said, “He’s so much your father.” And I knew immediately what she was talking about, even though my brother would be quite surprised by this comparison. Because even though my father had a very different kind of list of what it would take to make him happy, he, too, became discouraged and sad when his life didn’t turn out the way he’d hoped.

Later on I was musing to myself about how I’d managed to escape all that. You see, while my life didn’t exactly turn out the way I once dreamed it would—whose does?—I am content with and even grateful for how things have unfolded. Did I manage to escape the curse of being weighed down with a list of what it would take to make me happy because I was a girl and my father didn’t burden me with the ambitions and expectations a father has for a son? (In those days, girls were mainly supposed to just “marry well.”) Or, was it simply because my nature was just more like my mother’s than my dad’s?

All I do know is that when I first encountered yoga philosophy, it spoke powerfully to me. I remember one of the first things I read was Desikachar’s translation of the Yoga Sutras and how struck I was by his definition of santosha (one of the niyamas that a serious yoga practitioner should cultivate) and his translation of sutra 2.42.

“Contentment or the ability to be comfortable with what we have and what we do not have.” —TKV Desikachar 

“2.42 From contentment and benevolence of consciousness come supreme happiness.” –Yoga Sutras, trans. by TKV Desikachar 

In Edwin Bryant’s commentary on sutra 2.42, he explains it this way.  

“This sattvic happiness does not depend on external objects, which are vulnerable and fleeting, but is inherent in the mind when it is tranquil and content.”_Edwin Bryant 

And later on, when I carefully read the Bhagavad Gita, its basic message that it is equanimity that leads to happiness became a guiding light to me ever since.  

“For the pleasures that come from the world bear in them sorrows to come. They come and they go, they are transient: not in them do the wise find joy. 

But he who on this earth, before his departure, can endure the storms of desire and wrath, this man is a Yogi, this man has joy.
 
He has inner joy, he has inner gladness, and he has found inner Light.” —Bhagavad Gita 

How I wish my brother could switch from his “Boats Finds a House” philosophy to this one. But I’m afraid the patterns of his belief system (samskaras?) that only having everything right can make you happy is so strong that there is nothing I can do to make it shift. (Ssshh, I’m going to try, though.)

It is too late for my father. But in the last couple of years of his life, after my mother died and he was living in a retirement community, he did seem to reach some measure of peace. One day I drove him by the old house in Berkeley where he had lived with my mother for 15 years after he retired, and said, “I had a pretty good life, didn’t I? I had an interesting career, and a wonderful wife, and I built a beautiful house in Los Angeles…” 

“Yes,” I said. “You did.” 

For more information, see Yoga and the Pursuit of Happiness and Yoga Philosophy: Contentment

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