How firewood sparks that brief burst of happiness

BY JOE BENNETT

OPINION: Are you happy? Do you radiate bonhomie? Do you cheer up a room merely by entering it? Do you grin like a chimp from breakfast to Bedfordshire?

Well, neither do I. But help is at hand. There's a new science abroad. I read about it at the weekend. It's called positive psychology or, less formally, the science of being happy.

"Call no man happy," said Solon the Athenian, "until he is dead." But the positive psychologists would disagree. They claim you can make yourself happy.

And one of their number, Alison Ogier-Price, is running a practical happiness course to prove it.

It's a six-step process, designed to shift your frame of mind from Gloomsville to Merrytown.

She advocates giving thanks for nice things, being affirmative and optimistic, and working out what you enjoy doing then doing more of it.

In other words, count your blessings, think positive, and a bit of what you fancy does you good.

I don't mean to belittle the course. I have no doubt that a shift of attitude can cheer us up and Ms Ogier-Price has developed some neat ruses.

For example, she suggests that, when a driver cuts you off, rather than getting angry you should presume that he is rushing to hospital where his wife is in labour. (What to do if the driver's a woman, she doesn't say, presumably because all women drive well.)

Ms Ogier-Price admits that little of this is new. Indeed it's essentially the stuff of every self- help book from Dale Carnegie to whatever is the current snake oil. And there seem to me to be three problems with it.

First, positive psychology assumes that happiness is definable. The definition it offers is "the sum of life satisfaction, plus positive effect, minus negative effect".

I, for one, don't find that enlightening. Indeed, I find more truth in the definition of happiness as "the pleasant state of mind you now realise you had somewhere else".

Secondly, it assumes that happiness is desirable. On the face of it, that seems obvious. But I recall a television programme called Grumpy Old Men.

It consisted of men my age grumbling about such things as iPods, body piercing and the tendency of the young to use the rising intonation known as the imbecilic interrogative.

Two truths emerged. One was that the grumpy old men were bang right.

The second was that they were enjoying themselves. Being miserable was making them happy. I'm not sure how that fits into positive psychology.

Thirdly and finally, positive psychologists assume that a state of happiness is not only definable and desirable, but also achievable.

They acknowledge that each of us is predisposed by nature to be gloomy or cheerful and that we tend to drift back to that natural state, but by means of intervention they hope to prevent that drift.

I wish them luck, while at the same time thinking of leopards and spots.

Nevertheless, I do believe it is possible to cheer people up temporarily. And to this end I would like to offer a rival course to Ms Ogier-Price's. Where her course has six steps, mine's got only one. It involves firewood.

George Washington said that "he who chops his own firewood warms himself twice", and I am not inclined to disagree with a president of the United States.

(Except, that is, with the one before the present one. Or, on reflection, with the one before him.) But I do think Washington might also have mentioned stacking.

Last Friday I had six metres of firewood delivered. The pile blocked my drive. It took me half a day to shift half of it. And I realised as I stacked it that I was happy.

For a start I was taking exercise, and exercise is well known for releasing the endorphins of wellbeing. Furthermore, I was turning chaos into order, which is a fundamental human satisfaction.

And best of all, I was building something. I was creating. Every half an hour or so I'd stop, light a cigarette and stand back to admire my wall of wood.

"I bloody did that," I'd say to myself, then I'd step forward and happily slap it.

Sadly, I only had time to get through half the pile. So if anyone would like to come round and stack the second half, it's all yours. And I'll charge you nothing.

For there's happiness to be got from generosity, too.

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