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.