What does happiness look like and how do you find it?

There's a kind of happiness most of us are familiar with. The pleasant surface kind. A good meal, a sunny afternoon, a moment that goes well. Then there's a different kind, deeper, slower, less dependent on circumstance, that you only encounter occasionally, and usually by surprise. The first kind is what most people are chasing. The second kind is what they're actually hungry for.

Back in 2011, I was walking past a church in Helmsley, in North Yorkshire, when something happened that I still don't have a tidy explanation for. As I walked, I was suddenly overwhelmed by a sense of happiness so unlike anything I'd felt before that I felt compelled to go inside.

A line from Isaiah came to mind as I walked.

"How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him who brings good news... who brings good news of happiness." (Isaiah 52:7)

I had planned to walk up to the altar and pray, but two people were busy arranging flowers and chatting near the front, so I quietly slipped into a side chapel instead. It turned out to be dedicated to Aelred of Rievaulx, a name that meant nothing to me at the time.

I sat there for a long while, looking at the artwork, reading the inscriptions, and as I sat, I felt a peace and a happiness that ran deeper than anything I'd known before. Not the surface version. Something soul-level. Something that didn't depend on what was happening around me.

It was only later, when I got home and started reading, that I realised who Aelred was. A twelfth-century abbot of Rievaulx Abbey who spent his life writing about happiness, spiritual friendship, and the love of God. Not exactly someone you'd expect to leave such a strong fingerprint nine centuries later.

A different kind of happiness

In the ESV translation of the Bible, the word happiness only appears twice. Once in Isaiah and once in Lamentations. That's worth noticing. The Bible is huge, and yet our most-used English word for what we say we're looking for is almost absent. The original languages don't lack a concept for happiness, but the kind they describe is different from what we usually mean.

It's a happiness rooted in God's love and presence rather than in circumstances. Joy, but more than joy. Peace, but more than peace. Something that runs through your soul rather than along the surface of your day.

That's what I caught a glimpse of in that side chapel.

Four pillars I've leaned on for years

When I mentor leaders, or talk through how to build a healthy organisation, I keep coming back to four foundations. They've held up over years of working with very different teams in very different sectors.

1. Passion. A single-minded motivation towards something that matters.
2. Purpose. Clarity of action and the determination to follow it through.
3. People. A team that shares the passion and supports the purpose.
4. Place. A commitment to a particular space, geography, or community to operate in.

Take any one of those out, and the whole thing wobbles. Most of the leaders and organisations I've watched struggle have been short on at least one of the four.

The fifth pillar

After what happened in Helmsley, I added a fifth.

5. Peace. A state of harmony, free from conflict and disturbance. Real happiness, in the deeper sense.

But peace isn't really a fifth item on the list. It's the wrapper around the other four. Without peace, passion becomes burnout. Purpose becomes pressure. People become friction. Place becomes a prison. Peace is what keeps the other four from quietly tearing each other apart.

You can build a remarkable life or organisation on passion, purpose, people and place. But unless you wrap the whole thing in peace, you'll end up successful and exhausted at the same time, which is one of the saddest combinations there is.

Pause for thought

A couple of questions worth turning over.

• Can you name your passion, your purpose, your people, and your place?
• How are you wrapping yourself, your family, your team, and your organisation in peace?

Most of us can answer the first question fairly easily. The second one is the harder, more important question.

A note on Aelred

A small piece of trivia. If you Google "pursuing perfect happiness", Aelred still comes up at the top of the results, nine hundred years on. There's something almost touching about that. A medieval abbot in the Yorkshire moors quietly out-ranking the modern self-help industry.

He understood something most of us are still trying to figure out. Happiness, in its deepest form, isn't something you chase. It's what you find when you stop chasing.

There's a line from Paul to the Philippians that captures it as well as anything.

"And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds." (Philippians 4:7)

That kind of peace doesn't make sense from the outside. It surpasses understanding. But once you've felt it, even briefly, you stop being satisfied with anything less.

So when you imagine the happiest version of your life, are you picturing something that depends on circumstances going your way, or something deeper that would hold up even when they don't?