One Foot Planted

I don’t believe we can “be” happy. It is not a state of being. I just don’t believe it’s a standard for us to set, rely on, believe in. Even in our own American legacy, it is not happiness we are guaranteed, but the pursuit of it.

You can keep charging after happiness as long as you want. In some cases, that challenge alone, is enough. But if you think you will achieve more than a momentary instant of bliss, olam haba (a miniscule lightflash of the messianic world to come in the Jewish tradition), I’m thinking that’s a fantasy.

Some people get that about happiness. And they are mostly the happier ones.  But many of us continue to search for the secret bullet that is somehow just missing. Because we are told that we should be happy. “I only want you to be happy,” I hear from parents again and again. Not realistic, I think. And when we are stuck in the middle of what we believe and what we are told, we are left asking, “What’s wrong with me?”

I’ve discovered happiness. It’s in the nanoseconds of life.

I’m standing at my sink. The sun is pouring in. I am washing a very ancient dish that has travelled through generations to be in my hands. And I am struck by the pure presence and paradoxically, the legacy of that moment. I am feeling the warm water surging over my hands, the soaps sudsing, and I am having a nanosecond, of happiness. And then as suddenly as the water gushed out of the spigot, the happiness fountain is gone. Next.

I am sitting at a movie with my daughter.  I lick the salty, buttery popcorn remnants from my fingers.  I can clearly see the movie screen beyond the heads of the two people in front of me.  I watch the previews with delight.  My joy in being in that space, momentarily freed from aches, pains and the shakes of chemo, is overwhelming.  My soul feels like it is up, dancing in the aisles.  No one can see my happy feet, but I feel the joy of angel’s wings surrounding me in white light inside the dark theatre.

Happiness for me is triggered from the inside out. It is a burning ember that starts somewhere between the heart and the navel, wells up my eyes with joyous wetness and surges outward.

A nanosecond of happiness, the moment of pure bliss, fills my soul and invites me to have another.