Chasing The Promise Of Happiness

Sitting at a Coffee Shop Feeling Nervous

Sitting at a coffee shop feeling nervous.  Eating dry cereal from my healthy eating program and sipping on a skinny vanilla latte.  My hands are weak, almost too tired to push the keys.  Energy is in high demand this morning.

Last night I came home to check on my mom who has been sick.  I walked into a cloud of rank smell.  In my own house – the nursing home smell.  Every part of me screams no to this.  I want to run.  Run down the stairs and run out the door and get in my car and run far away.

Dylan’s music is playing here this morning – “Something happening here but you don’t know what it is……”  It takes me back and brings me forward at the same time.  A couple sits down at the table next to me and the woman smiles and says hello. I feel a slight kinship.

I don’t know what is happening and I am in a panic.  Is my mom dying?    All I want to do is get rid of that smell.  The smell feels like the enemy that is going to kill her.  I woke up this morning and had to leave.  I want to get as far away as I can.  I want to hire someone to be there and never go home.

I take a deep breath.  Breathing air in and out in the middle of a crowded coffee shop on a Sunday morning.  Distracting myself at the same time as paying attention.  The distraction is just enough to allow my nerves to calm down.  The voices and the music blend together and wrap around me.  Tears behind my eyes remind me that there is a healing force and this will pass.  I will find a way to take care of my mom.  I will get through this.  Answers will come.  This is a storm of not knowing.

Life really isn’t safe though.  Death is hovering over us all the time.  Life and death dance around each other even though we try to live forever.  And the only safe place is in this very moment.

I have now eaten my health bar and my cereal and my coffee is almost gone.  I am calmer but still on edge.  My hands want to have something in them and my mouth wants to have something to chew or sip.  More distractions that work.  I move to the next moment, balancing on a highwire.  Electric fear of falling on one side and calm trust on the other.  No one really knows how to live.  We are learning how to inch our way forward in the dark.  We carry enormous resources inside of us yet we know nothing for sure.  Not knowing may be the secret of the universe.

Meanwhile here at the coffee shop people come and go and they all have their plans for the day and their agenda of what they want to do.  They get their coffee and food and talk about things.  The children are excited and the adults mostly pretend to listen to them – some actually do.  It is noisy and yet everyone feels private in the middle of the chaos.  We feel safe – and whether we are safe or not, just feeling safe gives us a break from the fear.

The woman at the next table strikes up a conversation.  She says prayer is the answer.  She has found a way to feel safe.  Let God take care of it all.  A force separate from ourselves that is God.  Well if God is all there is – then each of us in all our imperfection and all of our not knowing are part of it.  The grand force of the universe is in our blood.  It guides us from the inside and does not give us all the answers.  I suddenly feel less connected with this woman who has the answer.

The music in the background now has a strong woman’s voice belting out the blues.  Her voice alone is enough.  The words don’t really matter.  She belts it out and leaves no doubt what she means. We are all strong and we are all weak.  It’s all one package.

So I am at least back to a level of acceptance that enables me to look at what to do.  I ran to the coffee shop and that was far enough.  My older daughter will meet me soon to plan together how to support my 82 year old mother – making as much order out of chaos as we can.  I will look at my lists and make progress in little ways.  Life will never be perfect – there is no way to avoid falling down.   We are all learning how to walk.

Chasing the Promise of Happiness

We are all promised happiness in some way.  It seems like our birthright.  There is a voice somewhere deep inside of us even in the middle of pain that insists that we have the right to happiness and joy.  The colors tell us this everywhere we turn and the birds scream it out.  Our skin feels something in the air.  And all the fairy tales end with the statement  – “and they lived happily ever after.”  Why shouldn’t we?

I remember waking up in the womb just before I was born and noticing how unhappy my family was.  I was alarmed and I tried to turn around and go back.  I yelled out with my mind – there has been a mistake!  This is not the family I asked for.  They are not happy people.  This is not right.  I cannot be born into this!  Someone out in the ethers assured me that it was the right family and it would be okay.  I was dubious, but it was too late.  And I was caught in the swirling power of becoming a human being.  It was not an easy birth – the doctors used forceps to pull me out and then hung me upside down by my feet and hit me to get me to breathe.  My mother was drugged.  I was alone in a brutal world in my first breath.

I have spent every moment of my life pursuing happiness or lamenting the lack of it.  It is my life’s work.  There are hundreds of thousands of things written about it and scores of people that have advice on how to achieve it.  Often the very people who profess to know how to be happy are like clowns with happy face masks on and when they take them off in private – they struggle with life and fall flat in utter failure.  The pressure of having to prove to others that one is happy makes the process more difficult.  Look at the life of most celebrities.  And there is no lack of temporary highs to give us short periods of feeling happy even though they may cloud our vision overall.

Now after years of chasing the fantasy, how to achieve happiness does not interest me as much as what happens to me along the way.  I am interested in truth and kindness – in love and understanding.  In the simple act of questioning and in the spaciousness of silence.  Perhaps happiness is our birthright and perhaps it isn’t.  But here we are.  And there are moments in each day that hold little pockets of pleasure.

So here is to the journey.  It is sometimes a fight to climb mountains and we fall down and sometimes we get it just right for a moment and it seems like we know.  Sometimes we are engulfed in loneliness and other times we are bursting with love and romance and all is well with the world.  At times our bodies fail us and we live with brutal pain.  Our children leave us and we wish we had not opened our hearts to them.  Then doors open and more people appear and laughter fills our hearts and heals us.  We grow wings again.  Life is a huge puzzle.  It may be that we are not here to solve it as much as just to experience it.  It may be that daily progress is happiness itself and that one moment holds the power to make sense of it all.