Tidings of Comfort and Joy

The holiday season is upon us once again, reminding me of family obligations, the ghosts of festivals past, of happy times, moments of youth, absent friends. It also marks for me the winter solstice, a time when the fact of being transgendered is more with me than at other times. To some extent, this is true with each change in the astronomical seasons but it is particularly true of this one. Adding to the cosmic influence is the change in the civil calendar with attendant thoughts of resolutions for the new year . . . things I want to change, things I can change, things I will change. If only all my resolutions could fit in all three categories!

If you are like me -- gender-gifted -- then you may well take pause at this time of year to reflect upon many things, and one of them is likely to be the subject of happiness. Our gift does not engender much happiness much of the time and each of us must seek his or her own course in finding personal fulfilment. In this column, I will address the subject of happiness and draw upon the wisdom of others to a large extent since I do not trust my own.

Do I say this because I am unhappy? No, I don't think I am an unhappy person. Do I feel fulfilled as a person? Not completely, but with each passing day I know what steps I can take to move in that direction. Will I ever arrive? I don't know. Basically, I prefer the wisdom of others because one loses perspective in focussing on happiness at all: as a subjective feeling it is undervalued and as a life objective it is over-rated. The French epigrammist, La Rochefoucauld, said it this way:

One is never as unhappy as one thinks,
nor as happy as one had hoped to be.

If this is our normal state, and I think it is, then this happiness we seek so eagerly must be an ill-defined and elusive thing. For most people, it is both. In the gender community, it is frequently epitomized as achieving the conjunction of mental gender and physical sex. I think we can all be happier if we simply recognize that there are many more dimensions of human fulfilment, and many more sources of joy, than that. This type of introspection can be a grim business, but there is some fun to be had. We can start with what we were told by a 19th century Archbishop of Dublin: "Happiness is no laughing matter." Or, as the 20th century longshoreman philosopher Eric Hoffer, said:

The search for happiness is one of
the chief sources of unhappiness

We can all learn something from that. By making some version of happiness our principal objective in life, we deny ourselves many pleasures and joys of daily living. We refuse to settle for less than total bliss, even if a small digression from the path is of little consequence and may make the trip more pleasant. Whether or not there is a major transition involved in our personal journeys, we should keep in mind the words of Margaret Runbek:

Happiness is not a station you arrive at
but a manner of traveling.

Another simple lesson we can learn is that our individual happiness cannot be a selfish happiness. Many of the joys and pleasures I spoke of earlier can be savored by doing little things to make others happy, or even a little more comfortable. Some of the sages who are guiding me through this column think that happiness must be shared. [T]o get the full value from joy, you must
have somebody to divide it with.
Mark Twain

All who joy would win must share it:
Happiness was born a twin.
Lord Byron

George Bernard Shaw, using a predictably socialist metaphor, would have us go one step further. He wrote that we cannot be just consumers of joy, and we are not entitled to be. We must manufacture joy for the consumption of others in order to draw down our own fair measure. This quote is from Candida:

We have no more right to consume happiness
without producing it than to consume
wealth without producing it.

Shaw plainly had no faith in lotteries or magic lamps. These are pretty much fantasies for the rest of us too. (I will retract the foregoing if I actually win a lottery, but I promise to keep the magic lamp a secret.) Still, Shaw was right about creating joy. We will be eternally frustrated if we sit back and wait for the blissful moment when our miserable selves are transformed. Surely we know enough about frustration already and don't need to saddle ourselves with more.

Here endeth the homily. As I read over what is here, I have the sense that there is really nothing original, nothing magical and nothing especially brilliant. We all have the means to be happier than we are each day and if that falls short of some self-defined Nirvana, at least we will be closer to it than when we got out of bed. What it really boils down to is personal choice. We can place ourselves at the center of all the happiness around us and draw it in like a whirlpool until there is little left. Or we can be at the center of a small circle of joy that radiates from us. I recommend the second choice and, as one of my resolutions, I hope to put it into action in '96.

To each of you, happy holidays. I do sincerely hope that 1996 will bring you an abundance of comfort and joy, enough to make you positively radiant and absolutely fabulous. See you next year.

Janet