I was recently asked to write an article about happiness. Initially, I turned down the offer as I couldn’t think what I might have to say on the subject – happiness has always been an elusive concept for me. But then I began to think – who better to write about happiness than someone who struggles with it? After all if you are, by nature or good fortune, a constitutionally cheerful person, you probably don’t have much perspective on it – it’s just the air you breathe.

But what is ‘happiness’ anyway’? Is it enjoyment of life? Sometimes I have fun with friends or feel really nourished by an art exhibition or performance. Or I bask in a sunny afternoon at the Hampstead Ladies’ Pond. Is it satisfaction? I do feel proud of  finishing and publishing my book, and pleased that my writing has touched and helped people. Is it relationships? Sometimes I’m overwhelmed with love for my son and feel blessed to have him in my life; at other times he drives me spare.

Is it the same as contentment? Occasionally, perhaps only once a year, I feel a wave of complete peace wash over me – a sense of everything being completely all right just as it is. As soon as I try to grasp it, it starts to slip away. This is perhaps the closest thing to true ‘happiness’ that I have experienced – total acceptance, or what a Buddhist might describe as the absence of desire, and thereby of fear. It always feels like a moment of grace.

Happiness certainly isn’t the perpetually grinning advertisements that surround us, or the competitive self-publicising of modern culture. The pressure is on to make happiness our goal, and that makes us perpetually dissatisfied with what we have, who we are, how we feel. But comparing your ‘insides’ to other peoples’ ‘outsides’ is nothing new: my mother always believed that other families were happier than ours, and that she had somehow failed in life because things were not perfect.

Are we really just seeking just the absence of unhappiness – what The Guardian‘s Oliver Burkeman has called ‘a long-term state of unbroken uplift?’ A friend who was brought up Catholic says that she learned from an early age that life is a struggle, a vale of tears (though I presume there was the promise of heaven at the end of it, at least for some. ) To be honest, it is learning the truth of this through what you might call bitter experience that has brought me in some ways the most satisfaction and understanding in my life. It has made me a richer, more complete person.

In the article I wrote, perhaps controversially, that I thought the worst day of my life and the best were one and the same – the day in 2004 that my husband Michael died. By ‘best’, of course I don’t mean happiest. I mean that in the midst of the most traumatic and dreadful event, I felt more truly and intensely alive that I have ever felt before or since.  It was a state of awe – as if I understood, however transiently, the meaning of life, the universe and everything.

I would like to have held onto at least some of that feeling. But perhaps that’s just another way of saying I wish I were somewhere else than where I am right now.