Friday, June 1, 2018

Happy

June 1st 2018

     The measure of my life these days is how many pages of writing I turn out. I have been on a quiet five-day retreat, and though the routines continue (I get up, take joy over a cup of tea, wash clothes, make food, walk the dogs), the countable currency is none of that but what the creative right side of my brain produces in the span of a few hours every morning. I write, therefore I am. Scribo ergo sum.
     Other people have different measures: a fireman is fulfilled if he can pull a child from a burning building; a good day for a minister is the conversion of some soul to his faith; if you're Pharrell Williams, it's when you feel like a room without a roof.


      Greeks defined happiness as the joy we feel moving towards our potential. Good definition, I  think because it lifts us above the mere trigger-happiness of accumulation of wealth or things or fame. It makes of it a quality of what we do rather than something to be pursued in its own right.  "There is no way to happiness," says Vietnamese Buddhist Thich Nhat Hanh. "Happiness is the way."
The irony is that even though we know that things and bank notes don't make us happy, we still go after them as though they did. We still buy the scratch lotto tickets ; we still dream of a tomorrow on the side of a pool drinking Martinis; we still think about moving to a better house.
         
        "Happiness is neither virtue nor pleasure nor this thing nor that," wrote poet William Butler Yeats. "It is simply growth. We are happy when we are growing."


       So, maybe that's what it means for me to be at my desk pushing words while the garden is emerging from its night cover of dark - I am attempting to grow into my potential. It is a sort of giving birth to myself: it involves pangs and fearful anticipation. It comes out at the end of a scream. It hurts and it is wonderful. And just now and then it is also handsome. 


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