On Happiness
I have a talent for exulting in the moment. I read articles and statement in books about how if you look at the moment of joy it disappears and is gone and it is a moment that therefore must not be examined too closely and I scratch my head. That is not my experience at all. When I see the moment of joy and fulfillment often at random moments doing very normal routine things like driving home from work my inner child laughs gleefully like a three year old in a kiddie pool. No matter how my intellect tries to deconstruct what is happening in my mind the joyful laughter remains.
I realized something essential about a certain type of happiness, the fulfillment type with a looser association with joy. It requires expectation of future fulfillment to exist. It is a happiness at having something you want and knowing beyond a doubt more will come for the foreseeable future. I have not often experienced this type. It has a pleasant and luxurious feel to it.
As to the pure joy happiness that has managed to stay with me all my life even during episodes of obsession and depression, although it certainly is muted when depressed, it does not die. I'm thankful for that.
Lately I wonder if this happiness has anything to do with my improving health or if the happiness is helping the health. It is odd to see all the problems I have seen before that sometime seem to be much more important: lack of money, lack of fulfilling social interactions, lack of satisfaction in labor, problems with health, obliterating valued relationships into cosmic dust for various reasons and feeling like an idiot; none of it even seems to touch my emotions beyond slight temporal annoyance. The joy is singing and even the turbulence only sounds like a lovely bass line strumming along. I may or may not be the biggest inept moron to crawl across the earth with failures adorning the days of my life but everything is singing and I can hear it and it is beautiful. Nothing else seems to matter.
I realized something essential about a certain type of happiness, the fulfillment type with a looser association with joy. It requires expectation of future fulfillment to exist. It is a happiness at having something you want and knowing beyond a doubt more will come for the foreseeable future. I have not often experienced this type. It has a pleasant and luxurious feel to it.
As to the pure joy happiness that has managed to stay with me all my life even during episodes of obsession and depression, although it certainly is muted when depressed, it does not die. I'm thankful for that.
Lately I wonder if this happiness has anything to do with my improving health or if the happiness is helping the health. It is odd to see all the problems I have seen before that sometime seem to be much more important: lack of money, lack of fulfilling social interactions, lack of satisfaction in labor, problems with health, obliterating valued relationships into cosmic dust for various reasons and feeling like an idiot; none of it even seems to touch my emotions beyond slight temporal annoyance. The joy is singing and even the turbulence only sounds like a lovely bass line strumming along. I may or may not be the biggest inept moron to crawl across the earth with failures adorning the days of my life but everything is singing and I can hear it and it is beautiful. Nothing else seems to matter.