By Anton Chekov

Presented at The Theatre School, Chicago 2018.

An internet search for the word ‘happiness’ returns over 611 million results. ‘Sadness’ returns only 33 million results, and ‘sorrow’ a meager 28 million. The World Happiness Report, published every year by Columbia University, ranks the world’s nations by happiest to least happy. In Bhutan, the government tracks Gross National Happiness in an effort to measure governmental success. The world over, we are happiness obsessed.

But is this obsession with happiness, what makes it and what preserves it, worth the effort? We want happiness for ourselves and our children, of course. But is a life that is full and meaningful filled only with happiness? Does hope of happiness to come blind us to the other potential happiness that is here? And what of the sorrows of life?

Someone I loved once gave me
a box full of darkness.

It took me years to understand
that this, too, was a gift.

The Uses of Sorrow - Mary Oliver