My Journal of a COVID-19 Year, Day 25: “ It might seem crazy what I’m ’bout to say”

Today marks a stepping off point for me. For this of you who have followed this blog for the last few years, you know I have done 24 days of blogging every December, but never a day 25. So this entry marks uncharted territory, God willing not the final frontier. When I started this, I think I assumed that we might be locked in for a week, maybe two at most. Now that we are nearing four weeks of confinement with an indeterminate number to go, I worry that as my world continues to shrink that I will have less and less to talk about. So I am setting an artificial deadline for this exercise to finish. Should we still be in continued lockdown, April 30 will be the final daily reflection of this set…unless I change my mind.

Though I have many things that occupy me during the day, I spend a lot of every day thinking about my life and life in general. From the perspective of being 61, I see my life at the two-thirds point with a solid third to go. This is of course daunting, one never likes to think that the milkshake has slipped below the midway point of the glass, but to some extent there is also sense that the lessons of the first two segments can inform the one yet to come. In fact this gives one the opportunity to remake one’s life again, an opportunity that is compounded by this worldwide timeout we are all experiencing.

So what might I want this last act to be? Whenever I’ve thought about this and all the things I want to carry on and the things I might like to leave behind, I keep coming back to one phrase, I want to be happy. 

The Atlantic is beginning this week a series called “How to Build a Life,” written by Arthur C Brooks. In the weeks to come the series will be examining different aspects of life in the contemporary world (though at least the first of the series was written before the extent of the pandemic was known, it has been revised to very much address our current realities). The first article is called, “The Three Equations for a Happy Life, Even During a Pandemic” (https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2020/04/how-increase-happiness-according-research/609619/). The author, who teaches a class on happiness at Harvard Business School ( before you roll your eyes read his description of the actual content of the course), attempts to approach the multi-faceted topic of happiness through three equations.

Though I’ll leave you to explore the full article, the first equation sets the discussion for everything that is to follow:

H=g+c+h

In this equation, happiness (H) is the culmination of three contributing factors, genetics (g), circumstances (c), and habits (h). Though our genetic makeup alone does not make us happy or unhappy, it is undeniable that different people have different happiness baselines, reacting more or less positively to similar circumstances. This is not to say that there is a happy gene, but a genetic combination that makes one predisposed to differing reactions to stimulus. Circumstances suggest that similar stimuli can cause more or less happiness based on the circumstances of an individual. Simply stated a person who is dying of thirst finds greater happiness in a sip of tepid water than a sated person finds in a glass of wine. Finally habits are described as relationships, work, and transcendental aspects of life. These are further studied in equation 2.

The human being (as far as we know) is the only being that considers its own happiness. Animals might be drawn toward pleasure and away from pain, but there are no indications that they reflect of these or consider why they feel happy or not. Because of this ability, and examined life calls for us to reflect on the happiness we have and what may create greater happiness for ourselves and for others.

Be safe, be strong.