There are types of happiness that can be bought – the joy of living cannot, it is pure gratuitousness, and it is the most beautiful one. It comes often, almost every day. We are the ones who have to learn to recognise it and to make room for it
by Luigino Bruni
published in Messaggero di Sant'Antonio on 02/10/2024
Happiness is the great promise of the new market economy. Yesterday its promise was prosperity, today it is happiness. It promises it to us in many ways, most recently with artificial intelligence that will finally give us perfect happiness – by doing everything we do not like better than us and by doing the new things we do not yet do. A happiness that has to do with possession, with comfort, with the freedom of choice, with growth, with ‘more’, and that often borders on fun and pleasure. Some of these commercial types of happiness are also good, we like them and maybe they even do us some good.
But after these happinesses and pleasures, there is something else, something different and much more important. It is the joy of living. I rediscovered it this summer, when I accompanied my mother and aunt to the seaside for a few days. The slow breakfasts in their company, the short walks, those few moments on the beach, the amazement at a rose blooming out of season, and above all, their words made me rediscover the joy of living. We all know it or at least used to know it, past generations knew it, and it was the true consolation of the poor amidst life's great hardships.
It is not linked with ‘more’ but with ‘less’, more with the little than with the great, it has nothing to do with comfort, even less with wealth. It is that joy that comes to us all of a sudden, without us having sought it or expected it. It just comes, it happens, simply. While you are looking at the sea, a child, or a seagull lining up perfectly with the others on the horizon line past the rocks and my mother says, ‘How can they do it? They don't even know how to measure distances!’
It lights up while during dinner in the small pensioners' hotel in September an accordion player shows up to intone old songs, and everyone starts singing together, clapping their hands, and someone strikes up a dance step. A joy of living that comes from merely being alive, that draws only from being alive, that needs nothing but life. And then one goes to bed happy to be in the world, with the joy of one who knows, hopes, to get up tomorrow just to continue life. That joy that enters the homes of the elderly who are left alone but know how to set the table with the same care as when the lunches were full of people and life; and while they eat, that well-cared-for meal, alone, a different sweetness emerges in their hearts, one that has something of the good nostalgia of yesterday and yet is all present and future.
Providence has placed this resource among those essential to living. It has hidden it, however, among the little, tiny things, almost invisible if we run too fast. And perhaps for this reason the poor and the pure in heart are able to grasp it, perhaps only them. It is part of the landscape of that Kingdom of Heaven where all the poor and the pure in heart dwell, sometimes without knowing it. Sometimes it comes after great sorrows, depression, mourning, and its arrival is the sentinel announcing the approaching dawn. As in the last scene of Fellini's Cabiria, where that final smile is the end of the desperate nights. It is grace, grace only, all gifted. There are types of happiness that can be bought - the joy of living cannot, it is pure gratuitousness, and it is the most beautiful one. Sometimes it comes during a different prayer, and blooms from tears of sorrow that turn into tears of joy. It comes often, almost every day. We are the ones who must learn to recognise it, make room for it, and let it enter the wine cellar of the heart. And there celebrate, clap our hands and, if we can, even strike up a dance step.
Credit Foto: © Giuliano Dinon / Archivio MSA
