We can’t say what it’s made of, happiness. It’s a hazy, ever retreating, shadowlike something out there somewhere. We’re pretty sure it’s in a person we can get with, a battle we can win, or maybe it’s in the deepest pocket of that Louis Vuitton in the back of the closet and we just missed it. But happiness doesn’t add, it subtracts. It’s not something to get but something to unbury.
We may not know what happiness is made of, but we know how it acts, how it feels. If it were a person, it would be Forrest Gump—pure, externalized love, oblivious to mocking. Happiness loves what it loves in its simplest form for what it is. Happiness lets go. Its pleasure centers aren’t burned out by the back alleys of the internet, its nerves not sawed through by undercover action. It lies in the grass, guiltless, free to notice trees and feel breezes and love dogs and Americanos.
It almost seems too easy, even boring. But there’s nothing more boring than doing the same shady thing over and over and nursing the same consequences. Happiness protects. Misery abuses. Happiness holds hands. It doesn’t rage. Happiness makes things. Art. Friends. Love.
Happiness doesn’t allow itself to be stimulated 10,000 times a day by the comparison and isolation machines that prop up our index funds. Nor is happiness about money because money without a soul tethered to something real is a death sentence. No matter how many artists, athletes, and business people we see destroyed by it we continue to make an idol of it. The obsession turns us into products, a soul being bought, sold, and resold on the open market.
To experience happiness, and not just get high, we have to choose between darkness and light. We can’t keep darkness as a mistress and wonder why it isn’t working. We can’t be happy while stealing from CVS. Or dressing up what we’re doing to someone as something we’re magnanimously doing for them. Can’t get it when we’re drunk texting an ex-girlfriend while vacationing with a wife. And it doesn’t stay up ‘til 2 a.m. drafting nastygrams about years-old dramas—resentment and fury do that.
To know peace, we have to weed out of our lives everything that blocks it: the jobs, people, places, and things we hang on to out of fear, whatever keeps us small and looking over our shoulder. Happiness lives in the present, not the future, not in what other people will think. We have to stop needing something to happen. Stop needing a stamp of approval on who we are.
Happiness is not out there. It’s love. Consistent love, really. It’s not a quarterly check-in or a “hey, what’s up.” It shows up day in and day out, month after month, a boringly reliable presence of love, support, and admiration, from ourselves, from God, and from each other. A want to, not a have to. It’s right here, as long as we remain open to it, willing to dig ourselves out from under everything we’ve let bury us and risk ourselves in the name of creation. What else is there?
Quote
I’m not happy if I’m not creating, if I’m not dreaming, if I’m not creating a dream and making it into something real.
Song
More Essays
Happiness Is A Game Of Subtraction
We can’t say what it’s made of, happiness. It’s a hazy, ever retreating, shadowlike something out there somewhere. But happiness doesn’t add, it subtracts. It’s not something to get but something to unbury.
Don’t Change a Thing (Except You)
When things really are that bad, our first instinct is to find out who did this and tell it a thousand times. But nothing out there needs to change. The pivot happens in the mind, the only place from which we can change.
Wait. Don’t hang up. Listen.
Life is not random. It gives us a paved road, and we can step onto it or stay stuck in the tar of our faithlessness. On the nudge before the shove, and why waiting is the design.
Tick. Tock. And you don’t stop.
There’s no strategy that wins this game. There’s only the choice to stop playing.
The difference Between isolation and Solitude
When we’re alone with nothing to do, the brain doesn’t rest. It goes looking for a job, and it will take a bad one over none at all. This is what happens in that gap — and what closes it.
Exist. And don’t apologize for it.
We’ve built an economy out of our own existence — guilt as currency, martyrdom as proof we’re good, self-punishment as payment. But there is no debt, and peace is available.