Where does the word happiness come from?
Lockdown or no lockdown, going to a restaurant or cooking at home, taking an adventurous vacation or just going to the park — we spend most of our waking hours in pursuit of this nebulous state we call happiness.
When you look at the word “happy”, what other colloquial word does it remind you of?
If you thought of “happen,” you were onto something. I was surprised to learn that the two words share an etymological root: hap, which means “chance or fortune.” “Happy” originally meant “lucky, favored by fortune, being in advantageous circumstances, prosperous;” it was more suggestive of the outcome of things that happened to you, rather than the feeling itself.
We all know, however, especially seeing this year unfold, how little we can control the things that happen to us.
Along with happiness, joy, pleasure, delight…maybe another quality we sometimes seek, if less consciously, is contentment. We use the word “content” outside of human sentiment as well, to describe stuff inside something (the contents of a jar, the table of contents in a book). The word is related to “contain;” con means “together or with” and the root tenere means “to hold.” Its connection to “satisfied” is “probably is that the contented person’s desires are bound by what he or she already has.”
While I hope all your external dreams and desires get fulfilled, I also hope that in this uncertain world, your happiness is decreasingly dependent on happenstance.
Enjoy this video with sage advice from those who understand happiness best.
