Word vomit
Happiness. How many people go through life without happiness? Or to put it another way, how many people spend the bulk of their life unable to identify their emotional state as “happy”?
What is your current mental status? What is your usual mental status? Are you too busy with the minutiae of life to think about it - do you spend most of your time being neutral and busy? How can one be happy if one is in a state of non-happiness?
How would you quantify your happiness level? 70%? 80, 90%? Perhaps it seems silly and arbitrary - numbers! What can they tell us about happiness? But think carefully - would you be able to say that you spend 70% of your waking day in a state of positive happiness? Could you say that and be completely honest with yourself?
And how do we define happiness? A positive emotion. Vague enough. And should we mark the boundaries positively or negatively? Definition: by what it is, or what it isn’t. Happiness is not sadness, for example. Happiness is contentment, for another.
And yet when it comes down to it - happiness defies definition, as most emotions do. Happiness is a state of mental health that renders the individual… how should I say it… happy. A lightness of being, a positive outlook, an optimistic view of the situation, etc. etc. But it is more than that, isn’t it? Doesn’t being happy in some sense imply some sense of being at peace with the world and oneself? Doesn’t happiness include some sense of transcendence? Or is that joy? Or is joy and happiness one and the same? But if we were to define happiness as joy, wouldn’t that reduce your happiness quantification even more? Because who can say that they spend 70% of their day being joyful?
But perhaps that is evading the question: which is what exactly?
Anyway, there are times when I feel “happy”. Happy with scare quotes. Why? This is a strange state: it is a state wherein one knows one must be happy - no, one knows one is almost on the verge of happiness, as if one were standing at the edge of a canyon, and one more push (one more hit) will send one flying over the edge. But it doesn’t come, and as one stands on the edge of the canyon and surveys the glorious landmass, the density of stone, the stratified layer of history piled upon each other, and the drop, the descent, the wondrous descent - that feeling of impending happiness - removed, yet there - is that not a feeling of happiness as well?
Someone told me that happiness is a choice - truth. But in many situations it is a difficult choice - when sadness is such a comfortable cardigan - torn, smelly, gross, desperately needing a wash - a cardigan one has been wearing since one was in kindergarten - it is hard to let go. I find sadness a security blanket. More than that, there’s that romantic silly notion of sadness - that the artistic, sensitive soul is one that is predisposed to sadness and melancholy. Or that being sad is interesting. How can one give that up? Being interesting?
Happiness. God-given? I am not religious, but I talk to Jesus and God. Perhaps, then, I am religious. My happiest, joyfullest moment has occurred when I am in contact with the world around me and I feel the whole world as a part of my being and I am intoxicated with love. Love for the world, and I believe the world in love with me. Love and happiness - never apart.