Cheerfulness

A cheerful heart is a good medicine but a downcast spirit dries up the bones.

              -Proverbs 17:22

A person perennially of good cheer is a source of bitter jealousy. In a cynical world, someone who exudes joy and contentment is viewed as proof of “privilege,” ignorant to the hard realities of life. The more time you spend with cheerful people, however, the more complex the picture becomes.

A melancholic worrier will tell you solemnly that she could not survive the death of her husband, yet a young widow of indomitable joy somehow carries evident grief with warmth and vitality. We are assured that those who are happy have not experienced loss, but what person has avoided loss or deprivation in this world? No, the difference is not one of experience but of interpretation.

Sorrowful, difficult things behalf all people. How they respond to those things vary greatly. So seduced by the science of statistics, we believe that we can predict who will succeed and who will falter—and we can in the abstract. But in the concrete, we witness miracles. What is in the inexplicable joy in the face of difficulty?

To find out, we have to move beyond the fear and loathing that a cheerful person inspires. While outwardly we dismiss them as Pollyannas, secretly there is something terrifying about someone who remains optimistic amidst the veil of tears. Seeing someone confident in joy might make us wonder if he is better than us. In a sense, he is. He has formed habits of gratitude and rationality that makes it easier to see things as they are and our modest place in them.

But such a person cannot always be joyful! We are told that always being cheerful is unattainable and will therefore make people feel bad when they inevitably fall short. But ideals are worth striving for, even if we fail to attain them. If we take the approach of sometimes cheerful, sometimes not we set ourselves up for a world of unhappiness. It is not in keeping with our habits of mind to pivot between outlooks, and the negative will always have an inexorable pull.

The path forward is cheerfulness always. Will you fall short? Yes, but you will be changed for having tried. Turning our mind to cheerfulness has to do with what we choose to see. As St. Paul exhorts in his letter to the Philippians, “Finally, brethren, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is gracious, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.”

The human mind, while indescribably complex, is also simple. We cannot fixate on lack and ugliness and appreciate what goodness there is. We must choose the lenses through which we want to look.

A woman facing adversity posted a quote on her refrigerator from Charles Swindoll, who wrote,

The longer I live, the more I realize the impact of attitude on life. Attitude, to me, is more important than facts. It is more important than the past, than education, than money, than circumstances, than failures, than successes, than what other people think or say or do. It is more important than appearance, giftedness or skill. It will make or break a company…a church….a home. The remarkable thing is we have a choice every day regarding the attitude we will embrace for that day. We cannot change our past…we cannot change the fact that people will act in a certain way. We cannot change the inevitable. The only thing we can do is play on the one string we have, and that is our attitude…I am convinced that life is 10% what happens to me and 90% how I react to it. And so it is with you…we are in charge of our attitudes.

An attitude, a lens, a habit of mind. Cheerfulness is an unsung virtue in need of restoration in our culture. Even more so among mothers who set the emotional thermostat in the home and teach children how to experience the world. As Louisa May Alcott wrote in Little Women, “Go out more, keep cheerful as well as busy, for you are the sunshine maker of the family, and if you get dismal there is no fair weather.”

If mothers don’t know how to be cheerful, none of us stands a chance.