Richard Kyte: Key to happiness is learning to accept things as they are

When my son was about 3 years old, I used to take him with me to a local lumberyard. The store had an old-fashioned gumball machine just inside the entrance. It was the kind you rarely see anymore, with a large glass globe filled with hundreds of huge gumballs. Place a nickel in the slot, turn the crank, and a gumball would roll out on a metal tray. 

The deal was that if my son behaved in the store, he would get a nickel on the way out. The gumballs were so large he couldn’t fit one into his mouth; all he managed to do was lick the coating off and smear his hands and face with a sticky mess. But that didn’t matter. Most of the pleasure was in the anticipation.

The gumball machine seemed to have a mesmerizing effect on him. He would walk around it, looking up at all the different colors. He was fascinated by the variety, yet also troubled that he couldn’t choose which one would come out of the machine. 

“I want a blue one,” he said one day. “Well,” I replied, “you get what you get.”

During one of our visits, he was gazing up at the glass globe when he spied something that troubled him.  He pointed a finger, and I saw what he saw: among all the different colors — red, yellow, blue, green, white, pink, purple and orange — sat a single brown gumball. He frowned. 

“Why is there brown?” he asked.

It was a small child’s version of the question, “Why do bad things happen?”

I gave the best answer I could think of at the time. “I don’t know,” I said.

Stoic philosophers had an answer to that question. The world just is the way it is. We like some of the things that happen, and we call them “good.” We dislike other things, and we call them “bad.” the Greek philosopher Epictetus said, “Just as a target is not set up to be missed, in the same way nothing bad by nature happens in the world.”

I do not entirely agree with the Stoics on this point. I think there are objectively bad things that happen. There are bombings, severe illnesses, fires and crashes. But for most of us, and for most of our lives, those things are rare. Most of the things that happen to us on a daily basis are neither terribly good nor terribly bad, they fall somewhere in between: a flat tire on the way to work, a callous remark, a winning scratch off ticket, a rejection on a job application, a surprise gift from a friend, a sandwich that has too much mayonnaise. 

The key to happiness, the Stoics taught, is learning to accept things as they are. Epictetus put it this way: “Do not seek to have events happen as you want them to, but instead want them to happen as they do happen, and your life will go well.”

This, of course, is easier said than done. It seems natural for us to live with deeply felt emotions tethered to a past and a future that resides only in our own heads. We worry about what might happen, vacillating between fear and hope, or we ruminate on days gone by, regretting things did not turn out the way we had planned. “We suffer more from imagination than from reality,” the philosopher Lucius Annaeus Seneca observed.

Once we stop looking at what happens to us as an affirmation or rejection of our egos and instead learn to see it as a test of character, the world begins to wear a very different appearance. We discover that we have resources within ourselves we did not know we had. “If hardship comes to you,” noted Epictetus, “you will find endurance. If it is abuse, you will find patience.”

Many people today think that to be “stoic” is to be without emotion, to go through life like a zombie, either hiding or suppressing one’s feelings. But that is not what the classical Stoics taught. They believed in a fierce engagement with life, always focused on virtue. They were much more concerned about how they acted than whether their actions resulted in what most people would regard as gains.

Consider the urgency in these words: “If you meet with any hardship or anything pleasant or reputable or disreputable, then remember that the contest is now and the Olympic games are now and you cannot put things off anymore and that your progress is made or destroyed by a single day and a single action.”

One day as my son and I left the lumber yard, the thing my son was dreading happened. He put his nickel in the gumball machine and turned the crank. Out rolled a brown gumball. He glanced up at me with a shocked expression, and then he looked down and stared at it for a long time. Finally, he closed his little fingers around it and sighed, “You get what you get.”

We walked over to the pickup, and I helped him up and buckled him in. On the drive home he licked the gumball a few times, managing to smear the coloring all over his face and hands. 

“Brown is not so bad,” he said. 

That’s right, my little Epictetus.  Most things are not so bad, once we know how to look at them.