Thursday, February 5, 2009

Happiness? What the hell is that?

Can you remember what it felt like to be a child, filled with wonder at everything you lay your eyes upon, when the sunlight was always golden and the breeze always seemed to be imported from some exotic faraway, carrying upon it the scents of freshly mown lawns and fresh-baked bread? Do you remember what it felt like to feel safe and loved, to see the world as a place so kind that you weren’t even really aware of the concept of pain and loneliness? I’ve never forgotten that sense of innocence and goodness… although I will admit that as I have grown older, that state of grace has seemed further out of reach. I know I’m luckier than most, though, because I remember… and I still occasionally glimpse that world from behind my adult eyes.

Imagine, if you can, returning there as you are today, somehow miraculously sloughing off your burden of cares and the ghosts of your losses. Imagine waking up one morning to sunlight streaming in the bedroom windows, a sunlight so radiant and golden that it makes beautiful all that it touches, and feeling that goodness irrigating your heart like a crystal stream. Imagine a smile rising unbidden to your lips, as natural and as lacking in artifice as a child’s, and feeling that everything you see is responding to you, smiling back at you with a secret warmth there for your eyes alone.

Imagine suddenly realizing that you are happy.

No, don’t think about it or try to analyze it; analysis is the trick logic uses to keep you firmly in the world according to the Wall Street Journal. The second you start using your grown-up mind to figure out why you are happy, it’s gone as suddenly as it appeared. Just breathe, and do the first thing that comes to your mind, exactly as a child would.

I sometimes think that such moments cannot last for long, that perhaps the fabric of the soul is too delicate to bear the weight of such joy for too long. Sometimes it seems that the human spirit was built for bearing an almost endless amount of pain and can hold together under the worst losses and defeats, but that joy can only be accepted in small quantities at long intervals.

Or perhaps it is we who choose it to be so. If you never truly love, you can never know real loss. We pay in advance for the happiness we find, and for some, the price simply becomes too high to pay. It is easier to learn to live with pain and loneliness, to watch it appear to recede as it slowly sinks into your being and becomes a part of it, comfortable and known, than it is to risk everything and expose your fragile and delicate soul to the agony of reaching for the stars and feeling your fingertips slide off their surface, your body falling to rest, broken and bloodied, on the hard ground below.

The secret of life is simply this: the world actually is that beautiful place inhabited by children and lovers, a gorgeous tapestry of mingled textures and colors, a world superficially identical to the one most of us live in every day… but in which each of our senses is a doorway to an endless river of emotion and awareness. It’s not the universe that is unkind; it’s we who make it so by our perception that it is that way.

Those of us who find that sweet hidden world invariably marvel at how easy it is to be there, how effortless it is to turn that corner. We only realize once we have set down our burdens how much effort we have been exerting to carry them.

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