Adjusting Our Grip: Waiting for Happy

Chapter 3 – Waiting for Happy


So far as I am personally concerned, I am here as a candidate for eternity, for heaven and for happiness. I want to secure, by my acts, a peace in another world that will impart that happiness and bliss for which I am seeking.
                                                          John Taylor

Andy and I were coming home from a trip to Nauvoo a few years ago, we stopped to buy souvenirs for family. I noticed some jars of locally produced honey and honey butter with the byline “Happiness in a Bottle.” I imagined that to be true. Don’t you just love honey butter? Seriously! I bought a jar, alright, maybe six or seven. It was sooooooo good. (I didn’t give any of it away, not a jar.) In my guilt, (and obsession) I tried to order it online but the company no longer exists. So I pursue the perfect honey butter still to this day.

If you could bottle happiness and sell it (and believe me, people do) what would it look like for you?

My bottle would be filled with that honey butter but since it can’t be, I’d put in sugar, flour and butter and a great Bollywood movie.

Aside from my family, which is a given (and includes two dogs), my two favorite things in the world are desserts and stories/storytelling. Consequently, I find true happiness in not disguising it - 100 percent of us are searching for lasting happiness. The pursuit of happiness is positively primeval and madly modern.

I like being happy. Creativity, productivity and a good challenge make me the happiest. For me, those things are all embodied in what I do for a living. Lucky me! I have directed plays for 30 years and I have cried with joy at the curtain call of an opening night when just 24 hours before I wondered if we were going to make it on stage at all. Thinking back, maybe I cried in response to relief and not happiness at all. Ha!

Here’s what troubles me - It seems that if I give certain of my students a good challenge, thinking that it will make them happy like it does me, it just makes them melt into a nasty puddle that smells like surrender. I hate that smell. Or if I have an expectation that creating and eating something that is terribly bad for me while watching a new episode of my favorite television sitcom. It’s fleeting happiness, but nevertheless, I do feel it.

I always think the young women I work with at church are going to love something creative to do, like plant a flower garden, but several of them just want to play in the hose instead. I should be okay with that instead of turning the hose on them. Their happiness is not my happiness. Their honey butter is not my honey butter. So can we really define happiness for anyone but ourselves?

I’m going to try to gather a general idea anyway and say that happiness is more than contentment and less than joy. For me, it’s a state of well-being combined with sincere satisfaction with life. It’s no wonder everyone in the world is looking for it but we all have our own version of it, don’t we?

Recently it was asserted by a Relief Society teacher that true happiness and joy can only be felt if we are living the commandments of God. It made me wonder what true joy is and why I’m not happier. I try really hard to live the commandments. I love all the people around me and I truly love and need God in my life. So...why is happiness so elusive?

Is happiness a commodity to be met and measured? Can it really be defined? This dear sister lamented that her adult son was making her miserable because of the decisions he was making. He hadn’t been active in the church for years. From her perspective, he was not teaching her grandchildren to follow a “covenant path.” In fact, she nodded her head back and forth in disgust, he had taken his wife and children on his only weekend off, out to the lake camping when they “should be in church.” In my mind, I thought, “I would give anything to have kids to take camping.” My happiness - not her happiness I guess.

I planned an anonymous letter to this sister to tell her that her son was never going to make her happy if she was requiring him to provide it. Maybe he had been offended, maybe his children needed him, maybe coming to church would cause him to crawl up into the fetal position in fear. I don’t know! Whatever it was, his decision to take his kids camping made him happy and that made his decision easy. We search for and do things that make us happy. Everyone does. Too bad his actions were making her miserable. Of course, I didn’t say any of those things, instead, I just raised my hand and said “Happiness is different for different people, I guess,” as vaguely as I could so as not to offend anyone. It still shut the room down cold. I wished I was the one out camping right then.

Ohhh, I LOVE camping. I love browsing the sporting goods stores looking for cool camping gadgets. I like to set up a tent. I like looking for firewood and roasting a marshmallow until its outside skin cannot defy gravity and must take the long slow stretch into my mouth. I own four Dutch ovens in various sizes, a stand-up camp stove, king-sized camp chairs with little attached tables, a hammock, five coolers (there are two of us!)…I take pictures of nature with no people in them and then I oooh and ahhhh over those pictures years later. Nature gives me its rest, which in turn gives me strength - a feeling of well-being. Consequently, everything about camping makes me happy! On the contrary – I have a brother-in-law that would rather eat dirt than camp. Everything about camping makes him feel “homeless and hairy.” Nature to him is a thing to be conquered not enjoyed.

I also love gardening. I feel joy when I can pull a weed, root and all! I get giddy when I survey a garden full of living green stuff. I rejoice when I lift a jar full of tomatoes from the pressure canner knowing that I will eat well in January! On the contrary, my husband rolls his eyes when I ask him to help weed. It’s torture to him. Sheer torture. (Though a warm bowl of tomato soup in the middle on the winter with a sourdough grilled cheese sandwich does, in fact, bring him joy – I have seen the dipping and heard the squealing of joy. You’re welcome.)

There are people that find joy in searching for new clothes – I’d rather die. “Retail therapy,” I think is what they call it. I call it torture. For me, the time spent searching for the right dress or pair of shoes is time lost. The biggest factor in my search for happiness is lost time. I have a genuine fear of wasting time. I have to call every event I do something important or I won’t do it.

Take “self-care” for example. I think this is the trendy new vernacular for taking time to do things for yourself, things that benefit YOU. Self-care, for example, includes spending your precious resources (time, money, etc…) on your physical person. I think. My small perception of self-care includes getting my nails done (how would I garden?), getting a massage (I would have to shave e.v.e.r.y.t.h.i.n.g first – what a pain), retail therapy (see the paragraph above), going to the gym (I have stairs in my house), taking a bath instead of a shower (I actually redesigned our bathroom to have the jetted-tub taken out – truth.) So until I change my perception of self-care - watching an old episode of Downton Abbey with one dachshund (Gus) tucked in on my left and the other (Lily) on my right is my version of self-care. I have felt great surges of joy during these moments even though there might be twelve things that need to be done, even 1200. When I make my world still for a minute, even with the rumble of laundry going on in the background, there are surges of true joy.

And that might be the key: a surge of happy.

When I was in my early 20’s my perception of the people around me that “had it all” included constant, contented happiness. And they all lived happily EVER after. All the time. 24/7 after. Sure there was the time Cinderella went through natural labor, and the time the Prince got food poisoning from eating the shrimp appetizer that was left out too long, but they were h.a.p.p.p.p.p.y. always. They had it all.

I had been taught that the gold standard of “all” included a temple-worthy, temple-attending spouse, and happy, well-educated, church-attending children. So, I surmised that the opposite was also true – you could not have full happiness without those things. So why bother? Sounds like a horrible risk! Because my perception was that if I lived the commandments and stayed worthy of the gold standard life, that's what I would get in return.

I went in search of happiness and joy early in my life. I would hear lessons in church about it – “Men are that they might have JOY”and then a lesson about what joy IS – an actual definition of JOY, a goal that included making righteous choices down a long, straight and narrow path which included the “Great Plan of Happiness.” I was also told that the absolute pinnacle of all happiness was finding an incredible husband and being a mother. “My husband completes me,” “Children are everything,” “I never knew what love was until I became a mother,” gushed everyone - all the time - always. I heard it last week. Call it brainwashing, call it whatever you want, but it was in my immediate ear-shot all the time. It became my perception, my truth.

Of course, the path is universal to the membership (and, truthfully to everyone on earth - but that’s not important right now) and included obedience to the laws and ordinances of the gospel. I was taught, that without obedience there is no joy (in my feeble mind ie..husband and children). I was taught that if I walked this narrow path and fulfilled the covenants (my mind = found a husband and had children) that were in place before me, I might have joy. I MIGHT be happy always. Eventually. I MIGHT have joy. That’s the old debater in me. Might isn’t a guarantee. There were things I needed to do before the joy (find a husband and have children.) It wasn’t going to be handed to me.

So as the years of acceptable covenant-making approached, I made those promises in full expectation that I was on the path to happiness and joy. Eventually. I was happily baptized at eight years old. I happily searched for the Holy Ghost in my life. I happily took the steps to receive and make my first covenants in the holy temple to prepare for a mission. I happily served that mission and happily obeyed the mission rules in expectation that when I returned I would be able to find a mate, fill a dinner table with children and FINALLY be happy, find ultimate joy, for t.i.m.e. a.n.d. a.l.l. e.t.e.r.n.i.t.y. with that family.

I looked around me. It was taking my friends between 21 to 25 years to accomplish all that. It looked so easy.

HA!

In between the surges of all that happy are years of supplementing my search as I created my specific path using my God-given gifts and my God-given agency. I never felt truly gifted and I did use my agency in darkness and impatience at times. I had my LDS moment of Amish Rumspringa. That set me back. I knew it. I had been taught that it would. It did. But when I did use my agency to make creative non-gospel driven choices, it didn’t make me happy and the darkness I felt could be easily identified because of the lack of happy that existed in it.

I don’t recommend it, but for me, going off the narrow path helped me comprehend the path so clearly. I perceived the light around my friends, I basked in their light but provided none of my own; I was choking on my own darkness. I didn’t see it then, but in retrospect, I see it now. My spirit’s progress as a human had slowed to a crawl. In my early 20s, I really had to get my “poop in a group” as my dad would say.

So I did. But since no two of us have the same gifts, environment or DNA, no two paths are going to be alike. Then there is that thing about “I’ll go where you want me to go, dear Lord, I’ll do what you need me to do... stuff. That. That slows a girl like me, with my bedrock LDS upbringing and training, down. So far down. I always wanted to run down the path toward my joy! I wanted to collect as much of it as I could – all of it – all the happiness to be had! I’m very competitive. But when you are also trying to do what your God wants you to do – and faithfully, on His time – there is the waiting. I. j.u.s.t. h.a.t.e. t.h.a.t. I couldn’t just go out and buy happiness, I had to do it in God’s time and on his covenant path. Otherwise - two steps forward and a thousand back.

I find no happiness in waiting around. For anything. So it’s in those human moments that we foolishly call waiting that I have experienced my darkest darks. It’s that in-between time – in between the surges of joy and happiness that the darkness swallows me sometimes. Consequently, I have learned two great things 1) I do not wait for anything that I can initiate myself and 2) I must give everything and everyone the patience that God gives me.

God has to have patience with us because he has given all of us the opportunity to make choices that take us far, far away from Him - some of you will watch others take those opportunities and be smart enough to learn life’s lessons vicariously through those of us that recklessly, enthusiastically took those opportunities. Mercifully, it is through the Atonement of Jesus Christ that every single one of us will live eternally. And that, my friends, is a long, long time to live, and yet, for some of us, living until tomorrow might be a long, long time to live. I had that time too. I had to stop waiting for my joy to arrive and rescue me. When that happened, and I will talk about that extensively in the book, my day became a week, my week a decade and my decade became a book.

Now go back and notice that I said MY joy. Remember my joy isn’t your joy. What I am waiting for might not be what you are waiting for. What makes your heart swell with happiness might make me shrink with fear. I know that now. I truly did ache for the righteous husband, two to eight children, the loaded dinner table, science projects and the lot.

That’s not what happened.

Here’s the rub - I do believe that I am doing EXACTLY what I should be doing, even if is isn’t raising my own children. I believe God has put a stamp of approval on what I do with the time He has given me. Because I believe that contentment is the seed of happiness, I am content, fulfilled and pursuing happiness. I also believe the prophet Nephi when he said, “...the righteous, the saints of the Holy One of Israel, they who have endured the crosses of the world, and despised the shame of it, they shall inherit the kingdom of God, which was prepared for them from the foundation of the world, and their joy shall be full forever.”

That’s an amazing promise.

So I wait...on the Lord..

But even today as I write this – I feel that happiness is off in the distance and joy illusively teases me like a butterfly in the garden hopping from leaf to branch to flower. It’s there, and then it isn’t. You can reach out to grab it and then it flies just out of your reach. But can I live just watching the butterflies? YES! They give me absolute joy. And in the meantime, I will not wait to see what else there is in this garden of life. I will keep moving, keep asking, keep doing, keep growing gardens. I’m definitely going to keep trying out honey butter recipes. That makes me really happy.

Chapter 3 Waiting for Happy Recipe

Happy Fry Bread (Thanks Upward Bound SUU 1989!)

When I was in college, one of my many jobs was being a counselor to a group of fantastic high school kids from Arizona. They taught me how to make fry bread and I can’t decide if it was a blessing or a curse because you can make it in a few minutes, but then I do. Make it. All the time. Dang it. Gosh, I loved those kids.

Now, I know it’s a contradiction to put a sort of “instant bread” recipe in the book right after Patience Bread. But hey - I’m the modern Saint remember. I need bread right now. I need honey butter right now. I need a “Navajo Taco” right now. Here you go:

Step 1. Put 1 - 2 inches of cooking oil in a deep frying pan or wok. Turn the heat to medium high. Oil needs to get to 350 degrees and maintain its heat after you drop in a big piece of room temperature dough. So start your oil FIRST - before you do anything else.

Then gather into a big bowl:

2 cups of flour
2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp salt
1 cup warm water

That’s literally it.


Mix the dry ingredients together then add the water. The dough will be shaggy. Knead it around with a fork until it comes together in a uniform ball, but not more than that. Overkneading will make it tough. Divide the dough into four to six equal pieces. Roll each piece out onto a floured surface making a ¼” thin disc. Cover with plastic wrap then WALK AWAY for 15 - 20 minutes. Let those babies rest.

Meanwhile, your oil should be ready. Check the temperature and make sure you are at 350 - 360 degrees. Fry each disc until they are golden brown on both sides. Drain on paper towel.

You can cover these amazing treats in honey butter, jam, powdered sugar or a cinnamon and sugar combo. We also use them to pile on ground beef, cheese, onions, lettuce, beans, olives, guacamole and salsa...I need to go now.


Chapter 3 Happy Homework Assignment

The Fry Bread recipe makes 4-6 BIG pieces of bread. You are not allowed to eat all of that by yourself. You must call someone to share it with. It doesn’t matter who, but it can’t be delivered or dropped off. You must consume it with someone.

Identify FIVE moments in your life when you were absolutely happy.


a.


b.


c.


d.


e.

3. What was the common denominator of those five moments in time?





4. If you could bottle pure happiness and sell it, what would be inside that jar, metaphorically? Sell your whole brand! What would it be called?