Life takes us in all sorts of wonderful directions in our pursuit of happiness

LAST week I visited the Irish Seed Savers Association on their farm at Capparoe near Scarriff. While there I met a young man on placement with the Association as part of his apprenticeship with the Organic Growers of Ireland (OGI). In the course of a short and pleasant conversation I asked him, “What’s your long-term plan?” Without hesitation he looked at me and said, “To be happy.”

Here I was, a 60-year-old asking a 20something-year-old what I thought was a sophisticated question and the answer coming back from the other side of the generation gap is simple, profound and disarming.

It caused me to reflect. In fact of late I have been doing a lot of reflecting, particularly on the life of my dog and have come to the conclusion that whoever coined the phrase; ‘ it’s a dog’s life’ must live in Korea. There I believe canines are on the menu for human consumption. My dog is no pom or poodle, he is a robust cross between a sheepdog and a Labrador with a lovely temperament and an even lovelier life. When he is not stretched out on one of three mats in the hall and the living area he is basking in the rare moments of sunshine that grace the front of the house.

If the humour takes him, he will toddle down the road to a local farmer where he can give expression to his inner sheepdog and spend a few days travelling around from mart to co-op in the back of my neighbour’s jeep. Meanwhile my time is spent between the triple terrors of blankness; a blank computer screen, a blank dinner menu and the blank stare of children left standing at the school while I try to hammer out a few paragraphs before another deadline comes and goes. I often fall over the somnolent dog as I rush to the door with the wrong car keys in my hand.

The life of a dog in a western middle class household is akin to the life of a sprightly retiree soaking the sun and sipping a cool cervecas on the Costa del Something-or-other.

If I believed in re-incarnation, the search for happiness might cause me to pray that in the next life I will materialise as a dog, but there is the risk I could end up in a sweet and sour sauce on a table in Seoul.

The search for happiness generally follows a convoluted path where people travelling in diametrically opposite directions have the same destinations in mind. My late father-in-law travelled the length and breadth of the country selling and buying cattle. He saw many miserable things in his time but he saw much that made him happy, like the sight of healthy cattle in a good field of grass, a clever invention he might come across or the sight and taste of a pint well pulled in a convivial pub.

He often told the story of a friend of his, a fellow seller and buyer of cattle, and a bachelor who made and held on to ‘heaps of money’. But the man lived a life of frugality that would put a Carthusian monk to shame.

Once, on a visit to his house he found his friend sitting on a stone in front of the fire. He rolled up another stone and sat down. After chatting for a while about the weather and cattle prices my father-in-law looked around the room, and turning back to his host suggested to him that he should spend his money on making his life more comfortable warning him that those set to inherit his fortune would spend it lavishly in the watering holes and dancehalls of the North Midlands. “Well,” his friend said, “if they get as