There's an old story about a less-than-happy man in the valley who goes in search of a guru on the mountaintop to learn the secret of happiness. The mountain is steep, with scarp and sheer drop-offs, and animals lurk hungry for man-flesh. There is no path. Too few travelers have made the trip, and no one has ever returned.
Four weeks later, covered in scratches, bruises and fang wounds, dehydrated and starving, our traveler arrives at the summit where a wizened little fellow sits cross-legged beside a stone cottage, smiling.
"Are you the guru who knows the meaning of happiness?" our traveler asks.
"I think so," is the reply.
"Well? What is it?"
"A pink cloud," the guru says brightly.
Our traveler's mouth, already slack, drops to his knees. "You have to be joking. You don't know what I have gone through only to find out it's --" and here he shouts -- "A PINK CLOUD? ARE YOU CRAZY?"
"Uh ... a purple cloud?" ventures the guru.
Anyone unwise enough to make that trip wouldn't have the wisdom to know where the answer lies. Thomas Jefferson knew better than to define the winsome one on a short list of inalienable rights.
In a world where happiness is a warm gun, a warm puppy and a thing called Joe, it's obvious we could all weigh in and never agree on any effort to objectify it, much less on Jefferson's idea of it. Did he mean happiness as a pursuit, like a career or a calling, or that we have an "inalienable" right to chase it, perhaps from sea to shining sea? His was an enlightened time, but the idea of the worth of happiness had not been long in vogue.
I think of happiness as a sense of well-being or comfort within one's life's context and feeling good about the world in spite of realities that would have you feel otherwise. In pursuit of happiness, on the other hand, I often go to the Strip District for a Korean bean cake.
On my way to the bean-cake vendor, I began a random survey. Duane Session Jr., a 34-year-old cook who lives in Lawrenceville, was leaning against a parked car in front of Wholey's when I asked what he thought the pursuit of happiness means.
"The right to do what you want as long as you don't hurt anybody," he said. "And I think everything's mostly working out the way it's supposed to, y'know? But there's one glitch. It's not all the way there. We've always known it as black folks, but as black folks, we make it harder [on ourselves]. We have to go to school, whatever it takes to make it better for ourselves. Put obligation and responsibility together and you're on the right track. Take care of yourself so you can say, 'This is mine.' Ask yourself, 'What am I worth?' Until you can do that, you're not going to be able to pursue happiness."
Farther down the street, I stopped to ask Linda Schueler, a registered nurse who is 36 and lives on the North Side. "Family and children," she said. "And living your life to its fullest without worrying ... about stress and hardship."
At Labad's Grocery, Lawrence Labad, 31, of Brookline, said: "Your freedom to do whatever you want as long as you don't hurt anyone else. It means, too, to be safe, my family safe. I believe I can make myself happy and I can make myself sad. And I should be smiling. Make my customers happy so they will come back to me."
David Clewes, 21, a North Sider, had just interviewed for a dishwashing job. "The freedom to make choices," he said. "If you're out there able to make choices and you make the right choices, you're somewhere at the end of the day."
Paul Papariello, a 63-year-old stock broker from Carrick, said, "I think it means being free to do what you want within the confines of the rest of the Constitution. Living a productive life, taking care of your family." He smiled. "Kind of boring, huh ..."
Ah, boring. Yes! The simple things.
We have the right to pursue happiness of a stature that would fly in the face of tyranny, but we don't have to. Our Founding Fathers did that for us. Our hardest job is holding our leaders accountable to those documents we cherish, to keep them from encroaching where our Founding Fathers deemed they shall not. Such encroachment could abridge our pursuits of happiness and is always a threat. Leaders naturally want to encroach.
On our nation's big day and beyond, here's to the People, we who are supposed to have the power, to a more perfect union and to all the pink, or purple, clouds, the simple and the grand.
Diana Nelson Jones can be reached at djones@post-gazette.com or at 412-263-1626.
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