Some­how, I missed the World Hap­pi­ness Re­port for 2020, pub­lished ear­li­er in 2021, and on­ly came up­on it from a sto­ry in which the al­go­rithms “thought” I may have an in­ter­est.

And so there was I, hap­pi­ly look­ing to see how T&T ranked on­ly to dis­cov­er af­ter scrolling through the list three times that there were no rank­ings for us out of the 143 coun­tries list­ed.

What sac­ri­lege!

We are sup­posed to be the hap­pi­est peo­ple around these parts but alas, all I could find close to me and to any un­der­stand­ing of the cul­tur­al un­der­pin­nings about Caribbean peo­ple’s hap­pi­ness was Ja­maica com­ing in at a bril­liant 37.

Where did our hap­pi­ness go in 2020? In fact, why are we mea­sur­ing hap­pi­ness at all in the mid­dle of a pan­dem­ic (asked the some­what bit­ter­ly dis­ap­point­ed Tri­ni)?

A quick sur­vey of the (stale) news and my spir­its were lift­ed by the Philadel­phia Tri­bune re­port­ing.

They wrote in April 2021, “Key Caribe on­line news in­di­cat­ed that in 2019 Trinidad and To­ba­go ranked 39th, which made T&T the hap­pi­est Caribbean coun­try that year.

“This was not a sur­prise. They al­ways seem so hap­py in news broad­casts, parad­ing in flam­boy­ant cos­tumes and danc­ing in the streets dur­ing their lo­cal cel­e­bra­tions.

“They are one of the rich­est Caribbean coun­tries. Even with the on-go­ing pan­dem­ic, T&T is one of the few Caribbean coun­tries pro­duc­ing oil, which along with tourism has helped keep their econ­o­my go­ing over the past few years.” https://www.phillytrib.com/hap­pi­ness-re­port-is­lands-have-good-show­ing-on-hap­pi­ness-re­port/ar­ti­cle_41434dcf-876b-556d-a8a9-4fb04dc­daa­ca.html)

Good enough for me. I am not about to ed­it any­thing they wrote!

Thank you Philly for do­ing what you do best: show­ing love to my peo­ple and an ap­pre­ci­a­tion for our joie de vivre.

The thing I know about true mea­sures of hap­pi­ness re­al­ly has noth­ing to do with the Cantril Lad­der of Life Sat­is­fac­tion scale which asks peo­ple to give a rat­ing of their life and their “hap­py.” Then, the re­searchers use these ob­scure rank­ings from 1 to 10 to de­ter­mine the hap­pi­ness lev­els of the cit­i­zen­ry/coun­try.

Hap­pi­ness, though, is an in­di­vid­ual, in­side job. I am so grate­ful to be alive and can ex­pe­ri­ence hap­pi­ness in my in­ner­most place, which plea­sure had been blurred for decades by un­whole­some de­f­i­n­i­tions and ex­pec­ta­tions.

I gave up a lot of things, re­la­tion­ships, and in­ter­ac­tions in or­der to qui­et my spir­it, and though liv­ing with a mood dis­or­der that can sig­nif­i­cant­ly im­pact my joy, I have learned that I am not my ill­ness and the miss­ing joy on the days of melan­choly moods is not an an­tithe­sis of my hap­pi­ness.

My hap­pi­ness feels more like a per­ma­nent state; it ap­pears like a rest at the end of a jour­ney, the kind of so­lace you get when you have reached your fi­nal des­ti­na­tion. If I were to de­scribe it I would prob­a­bly say it feels like con­tent­ment but the truth is that I learned in the past decade or two that in my hap­pi­ness I still ex­pe­ri­ence pe­ri­ods of dis­con­tent.

Hap­pi­ness helps a per­son to mea­sure their life and their life’s cir­cum­stances dif­fer­ent­ly. It is recog­nised in some­times sim­ply in mo­ments like last week­end when some­one point­ed out to me that I did not own a house in which I could live—a sad fact be­cause I had been pur­su­ing the idea for a few decades with not much suc­cess.

But from bow­els of hap­pi­ness I re­spond­ed: “But I have nev­er not have shel­ter. I once had no bed but that last­ed on­ly one month.”

And that’s how hap­py sees things: from a point of grat­i­tude, count­ing the bless­ings of the sit­u­a­tion even while in full view of the dis­ad­van­tage or dif­fi­cul­ty.

Af­ter that, I kept think­ing about the good for­tune I have had of nev­er be­ing home­less or hav­ing had to sleep on the street. [I re­call as I write sleep­ing in Heathrow Air­port, Lon­don, for a few nights when I could not get a flight as a stand­by pas­sen­ger some years ago; that was an ed­u­ca­tion­al ex­pe­ri­ence and my clos­est oc­ca­sion to des­ti­tu­tion].

There is a tool avail­able as well to mea­sure an in­di­vid­ual’s hap­pi­ness quo­tient. Still, ac­cord­ing to the pun­dits, find­ing hap­pi­ness starts with one’s emo­tions and is very de­pen­dent on the in­di­vid­ual’s ef­fort and en­vi­ron­ment.

For me, hap­pi­ness is a de­ci­sion I have to make reg­u­lar­ly, with con­scious ef­fort to be and re­main self-aware, with a firm grasp on op­ti­mism, fo­cus­ing on­ly on the things I can con­trol or in­flu­ence.

It takes de­ter­mi­na­tion to keep that cen­tre, but less­en­ing the “noise” in my life and tak­ing in­ter­ac­tions down to the nec­es­sary min­i­mum al­lows me the head space to carve out my hap­py cos­mos.

What about you? How are you plan­ning to take re­spon­si­bil­i­ty for your hap­pi­ness?