Joy Luck Club

It is surprising that Freud left out the third element of happiness, especially important in a poor country like ours, Hope. Consider this woman in a Delhi slum who has migrated from a village in Bihar. She works a back-breaking 14 hours a day on a construction site, lives with six other people in a single-room hut and eats, if at all, stale food in a tin plate. Yet she rejects the idea of life being better in her village with surprised astonishment. Why? Not because of better material conditions, although she might answer it that way. For the first time, she can feel the future in her hands, has hope of a better life for her children. Hope is almost the somatic conviction that there is a hidden, even if unknown, order to our visible world. That there is a design to life which can be trusted in spite of life’s sorrows, cruelties and injustices. The cynic might see the presence of hope in the poverty-stricken woman as completely unrealistic. He might look at her as someone who clutches the thinnest of straws, who has never learnt that there is something as hoping in vain. But what keeps so many millions like her cheerful and expectant even under the most adverse circumstances is this hope which is a sense of possession of the future, however distant it might be. Hope, then, is prior to both love and work. In the Mahabharata, "Hope is the sheet anchor of every man. When hope is destroyed, great grief follows, which is almost equal to death itself."

Can one say anything fresh about the second element: Love? Volumes have been written, will continue to be written on love in all its marvellous forms. Poets through the ages have sung the glories of passion and sexual fulfilment and, even more often, bemoaned their loss. Yet we often forget love or Eros is not only a force that creates life but also binds people into loving ties—of couples, family, friendship, community.

There is a neglected aspect of love, perhaps even more essential than sex, for sustaining happiness. This is intimacy. The longing for intimacy, for constituting a two-person universe, is perhaps more fundamental than sexual desire. I would let a poet convey the essence of intimacy. Bhavabhuti, the eighth-century Sanskrit poet, lets Rama, with Sita asleep across his arm, reflect on intimacy as "this state where there is no twoness in responses of joy or sorrow/where the heart finds rest; where feeling does not dry with age/where concealments fall away in time and essential love is ripened".

Intimacy, then, has connotations of being made whole, of completion through the love of another human being. Its feeling-tone is an utter serenity, a repose. Anyone who has experienced deep intimacy in love, much rarer than sexual passion, can vouch how intimacy can make you experience the world with a fresh vision. Intimacy illuminates what may have been hitherto perceived as shadows. It animates a lover’s relationship with nature and art, deepens his or her sensate and metaphysical responsiveness.

What about the third element: Work? It is a misconception to believe that work is a burden to be borne out of necessity. That in paradise, people enjoying the fulfilment of all fantasies without working will be supremely happy. At least this is not so on earth where deep depression is often found even among those who have retired from work with all the money they need to satisfy their material wants. We are programmed both by our genes and social expectations to be productive. Already in the first year of life, infants show pleasure in acting on their environment. A heightened engagement with one’s work, the full absorption in this activity, is an important aspect of happiness. Labour may be a burden but work is a privilege. By work I mean something we have chosen, which requires our expertise and which also benefits wider society. Labour may also be of benefit to society but it is typically something that is imposed upon us.

Now, there are few things in life as enjoyable as work, as rewarding as concentrating on a difficult task, using all our skills. It is the source of the feeling of ‘flow’, a state in which the person feels both expansive and completely at home in his body and the world. The sense of time slows down and time becomes plentiful. The best kind of work is worship or meditation in quite a literal sense, arousing the emotions of curiosity, wonder and, perhaps, also awe. These highly enjoyable moments—"happiness-pure"—occur more often in work than in leisure time.

So what would I say if I had to wish someone a "Happy New Year"? "May you have the flow of work, the completion of intimacy and never, never experience the loss of hope. And if the attainment of happiness requires venturing out from safe harbours, the courage to take steps into the unknown, then I wish you that courage, too."

(India’s best known psychoanalyst is the author of 16 books, including Mira and the Mahatma.)