Are We Allowed to Live Joyful Lives Even If the World Is Filled with Misery?

My ongoing project is to have a joyful life despite everything. I think I'm doing pretty well at it. Even through several years of horrifying health and legal crises for beloved family members, and nonstop hideousness for my country and the world, most of the time I chug along cheerfully. I take daily walks, giggle with friends, sing praise songs at church, write lots of books, articles, and blog posts, and ride with my two little granddaughters on the Carousel of Happiness in the nearby mountain town of Nederland.

But now I'm asking myself: SHOULD I be doing this? Is it permissible for me to whirl around on the Carousel of Happiness when so much of the world is submerged in the Sinkhole of Misery? What RIGHT do I have to be happy? How DARE I be happy?

I'm pretty sure the answer is yes, I'm allowed to be happy, and you are allowed to be happy, too. Indeed, some of the people I know who have the hardest and most heartbreaking lives are also the happiest people. The Declaration of Independence says that we are endowed by our Creator with an unalienable right to at least try to be happy. I believe more rather than fewer of us should dare to exercise this right.

And yet. . . . isn't this callous? and complacent? and unbearably self-centered?

Well, my claim that we're allowed to be happy even in a world filled with misery does NOT mean we are allowed to be indifferent to that misery, or willfully ignorant of it. We should work together to make the world a happier place for everyone.When it comes to our near and dear, those to whom we've made specific and heartfelt commitments of care, we should make heroic efforts to secure their happiness, even at considerable sacrifice to our own self-interest.

Here, however, writer Anne Lamott reminds that "Horribly, [happiness] is an . . . inside job for the few people you love most desperately in the world. We cannot arrange lasting safety or happiness for our most beloved people." We just can't. But, oh, we wish we could! And we do - and should do - our best to make them as happy as we can.

I'm doing my best in this regard right now.

 My husband is in a care home, totally incapacitated from advanced Parkinson's, unable even to squirm around enough in the bed to reach for the phone if it's inconveniently positioned. I visit him every single day, bring him favorite meals, do his laundry, keep him company.

One son is enmeshed in the criminal justice system. I've taken out a Home Equity Line of Credit, secured against my house, to pay the estimated $100,000 of his lawyer fees.

I support organizations that do good in the world: Oxfam America, Physicians without Borders, people working for justice for those imprisoned in cages at our southern border. I'm sure I should be doing much more on all these fronts.

But I don't think I owe my husband, or my son, or anyone ever, a duty to renounce all joy in my own life. Some people may simply be psychologically unable to have joy in such conditions (some days, some weeks, some months, that's totally me), but I don't think they - or I - have an obligation to live joylessly.

I could try to justify this claim by saying, which is true, that my being happy actually helps me help others more. Cheerful givers are preferable to sullen givers; the cheerfulness is itself another gift. Far from thinking we have a duty to be miserable, Robert Louis Stevenson even said, "There is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being happy. By being happy we sow anonymous benefits upon the world."

In giving ourselves permission to be happy, we thereby give others permission to be happy, too. I hope my example of being happy despite caring for my loved ones will give my children and grandchildren permission to be happy years hence when their turn comes to care for me. Isn't that what all of us want for our loved ones, even if we feel a nagging unease about wanting it for ourselves?

Rides on the Carousel of Happiness used to be $1 per ride. Now they're $2. It's still a huge bargain. The man who hand-carved the carousel's animals was a Vietnam vet who decided, after experiencing the horrors of that war, to spend the rest of his life just making people happy. I imagine that in the process he made himself pretty happy, too.

The motto of the Carousel of Happiness, which you can find on their T-shirts, is "Don't Delay Joy."

So: don't delay it.

It's okay to be happy. The world is a better place, for you, for me, for everyone, if it has more happiness in it.

Truly, it is.