Better to Aspire to Happiness Than Pity

One of my favorite sites to hang out on the web is GoodReads. Recently, there was a particular book I’d been considering, and one of the reviewers there was clearly frustrated with its overly passive, depressed protagonist. 

In fairly crude terms, he responds to this character with, “Snap out of it, woman! If you feel like you’re being mistreated, then do something about it, and don’t just sit on your bitter old ass and suffer and complain and write 'The Boredom Manifesto'. Sheesh!” But in a stroke of insight further on, he wrote, “Even if we have to bend the rules in order to achieve it, I think happiness is a much better thing to aspire to than pity.”

I left a comment, asking if I could quote him, and perhaps even adapt this as a motto. He kindly assented. Of course, these sorts of statements usually make people nervous, as if the ones saying them are advocating all sorts of shady behavior at the expense of a rule-abiding citizenry. But intuitively, we all know what he’s saying.

Photo image found on Skeptic.com
Science bends light with the force of magnetism

When we exchange happiness for pity, what we have settled for is the hope that someone will offer tea and sympathy (or a beer or latté), and maybe go off and ease our disappointments for us, hopefully without our participation. The sympathizer is mostly engaged with their own charitable ego, as well. There is a transaction inherent in the commiseration. By contrast, empathy and friendship take a close look at a problem alongside us, and we value the time spent and the compassion. There is reciprocal movement in the exchange. 

Photo print image: Elderly Priest and Young Woman found on Art.com
Pity means well, but does ill.

Pity is a cheap fix for both parties—it costs neither person much at all. It’s little more than a social reflex: a request for a pass from responsibility or judgment of the pitiable, and a murmur of noble relief from the pity-filled that they are fittingly above calamity. There are some who may be moved to pity, but who also seem to regard long-suffering as a regrettable lapse of good manners.

Illustration: "The Rescue" by John Roddam Spencer Stanhope 1900
The Short-term Rescue Can Lead Down Long-term Stairways

If we want pity, we can usually always find it, but it is a waste of energy to search for that. It is as commonplace as cigarette butts laying on the sidewalk, but it still takes some trouble to gather it up. If we want happiness, the kind that arises from our inner passions and a sense of purpose, then we must look to what inspires us and stirs up those senses. Passion desires that we flex our own muscles and find our own ways. Pity dulls, and can leave us muted and dumb. But passion, however weary, resonates in a pulsing call to action within our own noiseless ear.

Illustration: "Fairy Tales at Four Years Sober" found on Rehabreviews.com
Pity can take you for a ride. But you never get to steer and you'll miss your turn.

I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself-- DH Lawrence

Exceptional Excerpts: the Moody Dostoyevsky Blues

Sometimes the hospital can make one feel a bit melancholy and detached from things that go on beyond the bed, the machines, the folding walls. There is plenty to find interesting, funny and hopeful. But sometimes melancholy and detachment can be indulged for a little while. Here is a passage that I find to be perhaps one of the most distilled expressions of those feelings. I get by with a little help from my Russian friend, Fyodor, from White Nights:

"For, after all, you do grow up, you do outgrow your ideals, which turn to dust and ashes, which are shattered into fragments; and if you have no other life, you just have to build one up out of these fragments. And meanwhile your soul is all the time craving and longing for something else. And in vain does the dreamer rummage about in his old dreams, raking them over as though they were a heap of cinders, looking in these cinders for some spark, however tiny, to fan it into a flame so as to warm his chilled blood by it and revive in it all that he held so dear before, all that touched his heart, that made his blood course through his veins, that drew tears from his eyes, and that so splendidly deceived him! Do you realize, Nastenka, how far things have gone with me? Do you know that I’m forced now to celebrate the anniversary of my own sensations, the anniversary of that which was once so dear to me, but which never really existed? For I keep this anniversary in memory of those empty, foolish dreams! I keep it because even those foolish dreams are no longer there, because I have nothing left with which to replace them, for even dreams, Nastenka, have to be replaced by something!"

A Seattle summer night sky can be cloudless and glowing with the late sunset. I choose to replace this sanitized bedsheet with the white satin far above me, to wrap myself in, though I can't see it right now. That sky really exists, and will again, and I need not long for it as if it were only a dream.