The Wei Family loves World Happy Day

When I’ve been praying for something happens and my prayers are suddenly answered in the most offbeat way imaginable, I see the breath of G-d moving through my life. That was the case yesterday. Rachel Wieland posted that she was headed to the city to watch a screening of The Happy Movie yesterday on World Happy Day. Wow! This sounded like a fabulous idea so I dived onto the site to look for place to see it with my sons Ivan and Ari.

This was around 3pm. I found one screening in New Jersey and two in New York which had taken place at 11am yesterday morning and one way up in New York State and then one more – in Astoria, Queens at a social club, which was scheduled for 5pm. If the boys made it home early enough from Chinese school, we could just make it! So I loaded up my EZpass card, took a shower, got ready and when their ride pulled up I ran downstairs and told them to come on, we were going to see this crazy movie about happiness. I knew Ari wouldn’t want to go because he’s a high school junior and wants to do as little as possible with his family. It surprised me that Ivan didn’t want to go either. So I pulled the mother card out of my pocket and checked. Yep, it still says, Mom has the last word – I showed it to my sons and we headed to the car and New York City. On the way, we grabbed some Wendy’s for the boys. It was dinner time and they were hungry!

I had checked with the screening’s organizer, this completely friendly lady named Janet, and learned there was just space enough to fit the three of us into the room. We made the trip in good time and settled in. Over the next 101 minutes we were treated to a really special experience. The Happy Movie is fabulously filmed with enough variety of scenes and speakers to be really interesting, woven in with narrative from happiness analysts who explain the mechanics of happiness to us. Their premise essentially is, that the brain’s capacity for happiness functions pretty much as a muscle, which can be conditioned and strengthened. Once a person’s basic, human needs are met, his/her happiness depends on internal, rather than external, factors and there’s no substantial difference on the scale of happiness between people earning $50K and those earning $5 million. One of the analysts commented, “If you think money isn’t important to happiness go talk to a guy living under a bridge (and if you think it is important to happiness – go talk to Bill Gates). It was pretty fabulous to hear a man whose Kolkata neighborhood looks like a South Bronx slum, say, “We have everything we need. We live very comfortably here. We are all friends.”

Bhutan is becoming famous for adopting a societal happiness quotient as the measure of it’s country’s success. Its executives observed that destroying culture and land in the interests of wealth is not making for anything good in other countries around the world, so they’re doing something different. In Denmark, quite a few families live communally. They have small personal spaces but large common ones, plenty of company and friends, and they share cooking so have lots more time for life. That’s what I want to try next!

I loved watching this movie in a social club, surrounding by (mostly) ladies from Croatia and a few guests, like us. On the way home, Ari processed his feelings about the movie by chatting with a friend by phone. The movie made a big impression on him. Ivan seemed disturbed by the proof that happiness really is – according to medical and scientific evidence as well as carefully compiled social data – a component of life that is within the control of every individual. He was always the happiest member of our family but the satire practiced by college students has been wearing him down in that area for a while. I think World Happy Day and this movie may just be the key he needed to bring that good feeling back home to his heart.

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