The Art of Happiness

Rai, you're always happy. It's impossible to find you doing something other than smiling or laughing when interacting with us, your grandparents, or even a stranger you've just met. Observing you in your innocent bliss reminds me of two things from my childhood.
First, there was a pair of mugs that my Mom bought for my brother and I when we were young. Both had the message, "Life is full of little joys."
Second, a week in my high school English class when we discussed the themes of the book 'Flowers for Algernon' in which a mentally handicapped man, through experimentation, gains incredible intelligence. His subsequent enlightenment to the realities of life steals all the joy he once had from his daily existence. "Ignorance is bliss" is the quotation we focused on during our class discussions and essay writing.
Can that phrase be used to summarize several millennia of human philosophy and spiritual seeking? Is that answer to the age-old question of 'what is happiness and how can we attain it?" With greed and corruption leading to a global recession that has brought countless lives to the brink of poverty, with hurricanes, floods, and earthquakes toppling cities and devasting the lives of thousands, with the insatiable appetite for material wealth destroying the very environment we need to sustain us how can one be happy? Is the answer to seek ignorance, pretending that all is fine in the world?
These are the issues we struggled with for months and months during and after the world travels that opened our eyes to the reality that a great majority of the world's people face daily while we live a superficial and unsustainable life here in the West.
With all these trials challenging the happiness of our existence, we have found that the answer is not necessarily to be ignorant but rather to concentrate on the good. On the surface, "life is full of little joys" and "ignorance is bliss" may sound like the same thing but, really, they are not for there can be no variations of ignorance, and once the bad is ignored the good will soon follow. And so, we choose the former, to focus on the joys of life, however small. Every day, you remind us of the little joys (and the great joys) in life. In you, we see that it is possible to be happy always, to not judge, to dwell on those things that make you smile, and not those that depress and stifle your vitality. Sure, love may not be enough to solve the problems that already exist, but it can do a lot to prevent new ones from arising.
We choose not to be ignorant, but to be completely aware, attuned perfectly to the goodness all around us. During our world trips, it was often in those places where people lived the most trying and difficult lives that we saw the greatest joy, the greatest community, the greatest happiness.