Happy-Go-Lucky Means Living with No Filter

I found my happy corner with a simple Danish expression.

“I hate you right now,” Sofie says.

Sofie is tall, blonde, happy-go-lucky — and Danish.

She is losing at cards. We sit on the grass in the late afternoon summer sun, at a park in Budapest, Hungary, where we first met.

Sofie completely means it. She hates me. I feel okay. I smile. She isn’t trying to impose shame or breathe out guilt. It’s a simple statement of her emotions in that moment.

Sofie’s happy-go-lucky nature doesn’t mean she lives in a state of perpetual joy. Rather, she wears her heart openly, whatever her emotions.

Sofie says all her feelings out loud. She has emotional freedom and no shame in her feelings.

I realized from Sofie that I see other people as happy-go-lucky not because they’re happy all the time, but because they’re free in expressing their feelings. I also realized that’s the kind of person I want to be.

And not long after Sofie told me she hated me, I learned an important lesson from her about how to find contentment in life.

Sofie’s Sad Corner

After I met Sofie in Budapest, we spent lots of summer evenings in the city, drinking beer together, playing cards, hanging out in teahouses.

One evening, we’d just finished playing cards. Sofie had received difficult news from a friend. Of course, she told me how she felt. What she said next became an unforgettable lesson in understanding my emotions.

Sofie said:

“I’m feeling sad. But in Danish, we don’t just say ‘I’m feeling sad.’ We say: ‘I’m in my sad corner.’ And I’m in my sad corner right now.”

The way she said it, I could picture her moping in the corner of her apartment, head down, curled up on a beanbag, defeated by the world.

It got me thinking about the ways we express emotions in different cultures. I’m British, and we’re a culture that’s traditionally poor at emotional expression.

Danish people aren’t particularly known for their emotional outbursts — and Sofie never made a big deal out of how she was feeling. But emotionally, she was an open book. And I wondered if that was to do with the way emotion is understood in Danish grammar.

Mindful Detachment

Saying “I’m in my happy corner” or “I’m in my sad corner” is different from saying “I’m happy” or “I’m sad.” That’s because when you say “I’m happy,” you’re claiming the emotion as your identity. The feeling is who you are.

With the Danish expressions, you’re not claiming the feeling as your identity. Rather, your emotions are a location. They’re a place where you’re currently sitting.

When you see feelings in this way, emotion is a temporary experience. Sadness will pass. Happiness will fade. We can’t sit in these corners forever, life moves on.

In other words, by saying “I’m in my sad corner,” you gain mindful detachment from your feelings, and this gives you a new perspective. As the bestselling author and spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle explains in his book, A New Earth:

“When you are detached, you gain a higher vantage point from which to view the events in your life instead of being trapped inside them. You become like an astronaut who sees the planet Earth surrounded by the vastness of space.”

Tolle goes on to say that when you sit in the place of detachment, you recognize that “this too, shall pass.” Your emotions are an experience you’re going through, not who you are.

Emotional Agency

By saying “I’m in my sad corner,” Sofie is showing that there’s a part of her that’s choosing to be in the sad corner.

She could choose to move into another corner, into another emotion, but her choice is sadness as the appropriate emotion for what she’s going through at that moment.

Emotions aren’t completely our choice. But we can choose whether to dwell with them or ignore them.

Choosing to dwell with emotions can be healthy. It allows us to process those emotions, so they can pass through us, and we can eventually move on.

That said, it’s much healthier to claim emotional agency than to treat our emotional lives as something completely out of our control.

As Jill Suttie writes in Greater Good Magazine (published by Berkeley University):

“New research suggests that these beliefs about our feelings — whether they are ‘good’ or ‘bad,’ ‘controllable’ or ‘uncontrollable’ — affect us in important ways. Believing that emotions… can be changed when problematic, may help us recover better from emotional upset and prevent us from falling into depression and anxiety.”

Emotional agency means you realize the power you have to influence and change your emotions. You can’t control your feelings, but you can choose how you react to them. And that realization can lead to a happier, more contented life.

To fully grasp the power of detaching your emotions from your identity, and allowing yourself agency amidst your feelings, it’s helpful to see what things look like in mirror form.

The Mirror

Imagine holding the following beliefs about your emotions — and sadly this is how many of us respond to them (I know I’ve often reacted in this way):

• I am my emotion. Whatever I feel in that moment is my identity.
• I have no agency or control over that emotion.

When you hold these beliefs in tandem, you have no control over your identity. Who you are is completely in flux from moment to moment based on what you’re feeling, and there’s nothing you can do to change it.

From Numb to “Hello!”

That mindset — feeling you have control over your emotions — can lead you to emotional numbing techniques. Alcohol, drugs, food, the internet — all these can be attempts to block out our feelings. But this isn’t healthy. As the psychotherapist Hilary Jacobs Hendel explains in TIME Magazine:

“Thwarting emotions is not good for mental or physical health. It’s like pressing on the gas and brakes of your car at the same time, creating an internal pressure cooker.”

The first step out of emotional numbing, according to Hendel, is to acknowledge your emotions — just like Sofie did all the time. Say ‘hello’ to how you feel.

Paradoxically, by accepting and acknowledging how you feel, you begin to claim back emotional agency.

Happy-Go-Lucky Living

Thanks to Sofie, I’ve learned to pay attention to which emotional corner I’m sitting in at any given time. I’ve learned it’s okay to share how I feel — if I do it openly and freely, then others are more likely to feel free around me rather than ashamed or judged.

Happy-go-lucky isn’t about being happy all the time. It is about the freedom to be positive and upbeat when that’s your emotional energy. It’s also about the freedom to sit in your sad corner, if that’s where you need to be, and tell others what you’re doing.

If you can treat your feelings as a temporary experience, as something you’re going through for a short time, rather than who you are, you’ll live a happier and more contented life.

I’m always happy to spend time with Sofie, it’s so freeing to be in her company.

I wish you the blessing of finding friends that open up that freedom in you, too.