Come On Get Happy
A few years ago when I was a Director of CARE, the International Relief and Development Agency, based in Atlanta, I took the opportunity to go to see World of Coca Cola. I had not clue what it was all about, but I knew that part of it involved the story of the famous Coca Cola formula and that it was the corporate museum of one of the oldest multinational companies in the world. The history of the company and the chronology of its marketing over the years (what is Coke if not a global marketing company?) were certainly a large part of the expansive attraction, but it was not the part that caught my interest the most and has stayed with me all these years. That was the the Coca Cola Happiness Factory where the company marketing gurus spent the time and effort to research the basis for human happiness and then try to explain it to the visitors like me.
This evening Kim and I happened on a movie that neither of us had even heard of, Hector and the Search for Happiness, staring Simon Pegg and Rosalind Pike. It chronicles the worldwide travels of a London psychiatrist who has a seemingly perfect and orderly life (complete with a stable relationship with his tidy girlfriend Pike), but feels there is something missing. When it starts to affect his ability to care about and for his patients, he sets out on a journey to discover the basis for happiness in the human condition. It’s hard to ponder this theme and not think about Will Smith’s movie with his son, filmed fifteen years ago, The Pursuit of Happyness, complete with the intentional misspelling of the operative word. But these two movies have little to do with each other. I actually knew the guy on whom Smith based his story, Chris Gardner, who had once been a broker at Bear Stearns and for some long-forgotten reason, came to see me when I ran their asset management business. The fundamental difference between the stories is that the Gardner story is about finding financial success where the Pegg story is about almost everything but financial success.
Pegg is already a success by most standards, as is his girlfriend, but they are stuck in a place any of us can find ourselves in where he begins to search for meaning and cannot find any. What he does is go on a global walkabout, with no plan and no real goals other than to find the source of human happiness. The writers of this story knew enough to start Pegg’s search with Asian sex. He then moves on to an incident in Africa where his life is threatened and he thinks his way out of trouble and experiences the exhilaration of a near-death experience. He celebrates with a community of people who have little but each other, but still revel in what they do have as epitomized by yam stew. He finds the strength of human kindness within himself to help a dying woman find comfort and a moment of peace. And then finally, he finds his way back to his girlfriend with the help of an old girlfriend who has learned to get past her old feelings and get on with her life. this frees him to do likewise.
The director of the movie was Peter Chelsom, who’s name did not ring a bell until I saw that he also directed a great movie, Serendipity. That movie was also a searching movie, but one that was focused on finding love, which most of us would find indistinguishable from happiness. It is indeed that movie which had as its most memorable moment when Jeremy Piven says to John Cusack that the Greeks asked but one thing of a man in his eulogy, “did he have passion?” And that is the connection between these two movies because Pegg, the buttoned-up psychiatrist, is devoid of passion until he finds it in his travels and his interactions with the Everyman of every story he encounters, from the Chinese prostitute to the French-African mobster to the dying Arab woman.
I see this phenomenon every day in my own life. We can all choose to be happy or we can choose to focus on what we do not have or have not achieved. It is a sad, but ever-present reality for too many of us. Sometimes it is about looking backward, which is always dangerous. The danger has two edges to it. There is the danger of focusing on failure and sadness as we have all certainly known it at times in our lives. And there is the edge of spending excessive time and attention on the dreams of the future while ignoring the moment.
It was the World of Coca Cola Happiness Factory that highlighted and drilled in the empirical evidence to show that those who were able to remain in the moment and enjoy the moment were, by nature, far happier than those who spent their time dwelling on the past of pondering the uncertainties of the future. We are all taught along the way that ignoring the past dooms us to repeat it. We are also told in thousands of ways that dreams are an important part of who we are and cannot be abandoned. But we are insufficiently reminded that while the past and the future have their place in our make-up, it is the ability to engage and embrace the moment that gives us the best opportunity for sustainable happiness.
We have all known people who can’t seem to get out of their own way to allow themselves to be happy. The focus on the negative is a debilitating drag on their ability to find their passion. Instead of the pursuit of happiness, their pursuit is more often than not the pursuit of the concept of happiness, whether from past shortcomings or future illusions. If we all look around us at any given moment, we can find plenty to be happy about. The trick is in the realization and recognition. That and a decided ability to ignore what is not there and concentrate on what is. The old saying is more true than most that its not about getting what you want, but wanting what you get.
I believe it was David Cassidy and the Partridge Family, that hit TV show from from the early 1070’s that said it most simply and best, “Come on, get happy.”