“You can cut all the flowers, but you cannot keep spring from coming.” Pablo Neruda.
Oh my, hard to believe--a silver lining. I've been looking for one and today, voilà.
Remember the quote from Margaret Renkl in the Post of Mar 11, 2022?
In this troubled world, it would be a crime to snuff out any flicker of happiness that somehow leaps into life.
Well, here's another flicker of, aptly, happiness about happiness.
The annual World Happiness Report (WHR) has just been released. You know, the report that finds Finland "the happiest place in the world" each year? (Or at least the last 5 years.) If you've forgotten how it works, the WHR is authored by independent experts who compile the results of a global survey of people from more than 150 countries. It's published by the United Nations.
Our ranking has never been high, with low institutional trust and steep income inequality affecting what we see as our best possible lives. But we did modestly rise from 19th to 16th this year which, given the darkness of the times, may be more meaningful than it looks.
After all, like memory, happiness is elusive. And two years of pandemic readjustments have disrupted people's feelings. Yet worldwide, people's overall positive emotions have continued to be more than twice as frequent as their negative emotions. Measurements of laughter, enjoyment, and learning or doing something new, lead measurements of sadness, anger or worry 2 to 1.
And where sadness or worry did increase, in 2020 during the first year of the pandemic, anger did not. We stood together. We worried together. We were sad together. We were not angry with one another, and this is worldwide. We the people ignored political finger-pointing. If laughter decreased, it was more than made up for by learning or doing something new. All those hobbies, recipes, and new or recovered skills raised our happiness quotient. We weren't simply staying afloat, much as it seemed some days. Working from home made us happy. Even having the children home did. Even (or maybe especially) not working did.
Historically Canada, Australia and New Zealand, countries with social safety nets, measure high in life evaluation and remained so. But the real surge, for the whole world, was in simple kindness. Sewing masks, volunteering for clinical trials (not a small thing), checking on neighbors, gathering family and friends outdoors or through Zoom, providing free services . . . . The ways of stepping up have been as varied as we are. In every region of the globe during 2020 and 2021 strangers helped strangers more--a whopping 25% more. Everywhere donations, volunteering, and selflessness increased.
Why is this good news, other than the obvious? Well, because positive emotions promote optimism, resilience, and increase our ability to adapt to future challenges. In other words, they're not just an end in themselves. They carry over into tomorrow.
The pandemic has cut many flowers. Lives, education, jobs are like a meadow mown. But spring came anyway. It's here and in bloom.
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