The mystery of happiness
Do you ever have moments raptured by nostalgia? Perhaps it's a smell or a symphony of sensory deportation… one that takes you to a place where lemons melt like lemon drops and reality is suspended by the imagination’s ethereal wonder.
For me, it’s often music that can transport my mind to a place my body knows very little of. When I look out my window at the world that passes before me, I wonder about the people that have walked this land, centuries and ages before me. What has occurred in this space I occupy? Where does all that energy go? Music has the potential to transport me to a place where the magick of being alive, extends beyond the concepts of time and space: things that drift behind the veil as the record comes to a halt.
What is true happiness and how does one find it?
For a while now, I imagine happiness as the joy that exists in moments in between, often gone unnoticed until reflected upon in memory. How is that we can associate happiness more with the past than the present moment? More often than not I will recall feeling content in a time when at that moment, I may have not recognized the level of peace I was experiencing. In fact, it was in my mid-twenties that I began pausing in moments of greatness and trying to wallow and inhale every ounce of beauty and gratitude I could hold by the presence I found myself in. It’s a practice, but I still find the illusion of happiness greatly mysterious. Why is it that I exist in such polarities that I am either flushed with life and thriving on the pulse or hollowed out and disparaged by the loss of human joy? I suppose it’s a balancing act: this human experience.
As individuals, we often have reference points to which we deem our emotional state. We base our wellbeing on what we consider “good enough.” This process demands great mental anguish by steeping our emotions through the filter of comparison. It’s often I am/not happy because _____ happened and it is/not what I hoped for. But why does our happiness depend on so many external components? Is it possible to stabilize our own interior foundation for peace in a way that makes us less vulnerable to the daily onslaught of experience? Is there a way to do that whilst remaining in touch with the struggles of all the other forms of life with whom you share your planet?
It could be considered one of the grand ol’ questions of the human species: How to be in the world but not of the world?
I would imagine that long ago humans were more collaborative and mystically spiritualized in a way that made these questions seem like no-brainers, and perhaps, they’re just that.
So excuse me brain, while I lean into love, but I think we may have forgotten some things our ancestors wanted us to remember, indeed the information may have been stolen or destroyed, but I believe it is inside us, we just need to get a little quiet, still, and listen…
The great mysteries of life often never change. It is our relating to them that ebbs and flows through the evolving cyclical nature of time. We happen to be alive in a moment that signifies great tension and with that, impact, on the ripple effects of life on Earth, in all ways political, environmental, economic, and civil. How can we situate ourselves so that we are prepared to relate to one another in a way that centers our commonality and values our unique experiences, one that builds the foundation for reparation and justice? No one knows why we’re all here right now, but amidst the bounty of ideas, what happens when we recognize the potential in carrying the weight of our ancestors whilst trying to soften the impact humans have on each other and the planet?
Happiness is a mystery because we don’t know how to keep it, and as we chase after symbols of joy, we forget that the way out is through and to recognize the person next to you.
Keep trying until you get it, then watch it go.
