For months this feeling has been coming closer
The Suitor ; Jane Kenyon
We lie back to back. Curtains
lift and fall,
like the chest of someone sleeping.
Wind moves the leaves of the box elder;
they show their light undersides,
turning all at once
like a school of fish.
Suddenly I understand that I am happy.
For months this feeling
has been coming closer, stopping
for short visits, like the timid suitor.
---
I'm happy. So why is it that when Mr Tee asked for the happiest moment we've had, I couldn't think of a specific event? Is it the accumulation of too many happy events that brought about the inability to pinpoint to one?
I avoided the question and left the classroom before I was asked for the answer to that. Perhaps I wanted, just a little, for the question to come to me, just so I could be forced to think of the answer. The happiest moment? How do you measure, and compare? I can remember the depressing moments. I might be able to pinpoint the one with the most intensity without much thinking. Yet the happiest?
As I was walking out of school I mused about it. Happiest, a measure of intensity of "highness"? Are the moments you feel the highest the moments which are the happiest? Or are the happiest moments the moments you would grasp onto feebly for any minute flicker of comfort, when you feel isolated, outcasted; when there is the night hovering outside your brightly lit room, infiltrating and intermingling with the light particles such that you feel its whirlpool pull anyway? They're not the same. You know that too.
Happiness is an emotional or affective state that is characterized by feelings of enjoyment, pleasure, and satisfaction. ... States associated with happiness include well-being, delight, health, safety, contentment, and love. ... Happiness is often associated with the presence of favorable circumstances such as a supportive family life, a loving marriage, and economic stability.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happiness
Does something need to happen to be called your happiest moment? Must there be a reason for everything? Perhaps the accumulation of things might bring about a certain emotional state, perhaps you can claim that as a reason. A reason makes you deal with them more easily; just solve the known equation and you get the answer. The unknown is that which scares, isn't it? We can't deal with the unknown.
Logic holds us, we make logic links from paragraph to paragraph. A good essay shows you what's going on in the author's mind so that you won't feel bewildered. The need for structure, the need for order and sense. We try to make our lives that way too. Find a point and work towards it, as though we really believe that our lives are a path to walk on towards the finishing line, linearity, breadthless length, one dimensional. Much easier, indeed, to think in terms of dimensions, reduce the universe to a single plane.
Consistency travels on a line too, the line of predictability, a state of stagnancy, sweet familiarity.
It would be nice to don on wings and neglect the dots that fall outside the line. Curve of best fit, ignore the outliers. We'll correct the state of the world and mark lines everywhere with science and math. Oh, such arrogance over scientific achievements and progress, made within a controlled environment. A leads to B, because C and D remain constant. Control experiment. Power and control.
How absurd to quantify. Even colours have numbers for them now. Who thinks of #FFCC33 when they look at sunsets? Who pinpoints the source of their happiness to the mesolimbic pathway?
Is happiness an absence of depression?
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far and wee
you and i together mysteriously and always floating
Sunday, July 22
11:38 AM
