I actively abandoned the happiness chronicles. To quote Thich Nhat Hanh, “There is no way to happiness. Happiness is the way.” In that sense the entirety of what I was trying to accomplish was wrong. I was asking the wrong questions. It isn’t ‘what makes me happy’ but when do I experience this feeling naturally? What are these moments and are they something that is in balance or something I need to devote more time to? The other side of that equation is this: What are the times that bring me sadness? How much time and energy is devoted to that? The answer is too much.
There is another quote on happiness, attributed to Connor Franta, that goes like this, “Use your smile to change the world. Don’t let the world change your smile.” I did let the world–let circumstance–rob me of the very core of my happy engine. Other people’s problems and drama, family drama, the echoes of very bad choices made; all of this combined to steal that critical part of me that makes me who I am. I stopped being a happy person and became this greying, stressed out old man in the span of 5 years. What should be the best part of my life has daily served as the best and the worst largely due to expectations and misunderstandings on both our parts. My partner says I need to find happiness within myself and not in another person, and that fundamental truth is what first led me into the chronicles, but to quote another writer, Heinlein, “Love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.” Not coincidentally or even germane to the point, hate is the condition in which the pain of another person is essential to your own.
So I am at a place where I’ve abandoned the idea of happiness and fallen back into the idea of distraction. Kissing and holding my partner, playing with my kids, a good story, a film, a game. These are the things that eat my time for the good. Coaching, teaching, trying to understand why my relationship is what it is and how to change that, searching for a place to live, trying to make sense of my finances. These are the things that shove me towards despair. In truth I need to kill off the things that function to kill me and make peace with the truths of the now.
We are not guaranteed any future, but we have the ability and the responsibility to hope. I can do that, if quietly, and try to set the conditions for such things to be reality.