Find Happiness

“Find Happiness in Columbus Isle, Bahamas and Turkoise, Turks and Caicos

$1,699 (taxes extra).”

I read this add a few weeks ago, pasted above a gorgeous picture of ‘paradise’ with a couple who looked very much in love with life and in love with each other so I copied it to comment – but never got around to it. It struck me strongly – with sadness and with frustration. Advertisers trying to benefit from people’s discontent, for their yearning for something more, for a desire to ‘find happiness’. A claim – a promise even (though false) that one can find happiness through travelling to a beautiful location. Such a lie, such a horrible, horrible lie that I imagine many people believe. Taxes extra. True, they may feel happy while there – but feeling happy and the lasting benefit that is implied in finding happiness are two very different things in my mind. Now I’ve returned from a ‘paradise’. I certainly wasn’t trying to find happiness – nothing of the sort. But I did find, (or at least have time to concentrate on and contemplate) that I am not happy.

That sounds so final, so conclusive – and it isn’t. And I don’t mean for it to be. I’m not depressed, I’m not miserable. I have many moments of Joy (and of joy). I often have feelings of happiness but am not what I would necessarily call ‘happy’. There seems to be a weight, a veil – something that draws me from a state of contentment that I once knew but seem no longer able to fully grasp. As I’m writing this I believe I’ve commented on it before here . . . but I’ll continue, not viewing it as repetitiveness but as reaffirmation of the need for change – the need for life.

One of the things that I believe was/is keeping me from this – what I most certainly desire – is the seeming inability to live in the moments – in my moments, and realize that is what they are my moments. I’ll only get each of them once and to think of the past or the future – to wonder, to stress, to do what we tend to do because of stress or fear, or uncertainty or whatever else is to steal from the preciousness of each moment we’re allowed to have.

I was in Mexico – able to visit a brother I’ve hardly seen since I was child. I was there seeing ruins I’d longed to see pretty much since I knew of their existence – I was in the heat, near the ocean and I was allowing myself to only half experience all of it. And for the first few days of it I was letting stress about school work, about fear of being irresponsible, and I don’t know whatever else just cast a shadow over my life – not fully living or enjoying what I so longed to enjoy. Thankfully, a movie I watched my third or fourth night reminded me of what I was doing and how I needed to change. It’s so funny (and I suppose sad) how we can learn things – know them, really know them and encompass them in our lives and then just let those lessons drift away – go back to our old, negative modes of existence and have to learn the same thing over again.