Chasing Holy Grail of emotions
I’m betting nobody has made it this far into January without being wished a happy new year. Ah yes, happiness … dated a boy once – well, a man – who drove an ancient threedoor Golf, which might have been white or, perhaps, just faded, held together by rust.
Whenever we went chugging up a hill – he lived in Bezuidenhout Valley so there were a lot of hills, and much chugging – he’d roll down the window, windmill his arm, and yell “yabba-dabba-do!” at bewildered pedestrians. It always made me laugh.
As we clunked and parped into the distance, I hope they saw his bumper sticker. It read: “It’s never too late to have a happy childhood.”
My Fred Flintstone and I did not last, but my determination to always cling tight to happiness did.
I had a happy childhood: I was loved enough, hugged enough, fed enough (and then some), and I laughed often. On balance, I’m having a happy adulthood, too. Lucky me.
Ask any unhappy soul what they want and they invariably declare that they just want to be happy. Ask any parent what they want for their kids, and they reply happiness.
Happiness is the Holy Grail of emotions. Happiness is, I think, my default.
However, sometimes I suspect my determined, jealously guarded happiness is my downfall too.
As Tolstoy said in the very first line of Anna Karenina: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”, and immediately you knew the story he was about to tell would not be a happy one. At least he had a story though. I’m a “creative” person, a writer, a sometime painter, and on occasion, I suspect, I’m hampered by not being a tortured artist, hobbled by my dread of being unhappy, of facing the darkness.
The truth is, happiness is not particularly interesting. There may be books devoted to finding it, industries built on manufacturing fleeting moments of it, religions offering it in the next life, and “happy pills” which promise to create some semblance of it chemically, but happiness is the end of the journey, not the story you narrate.
So I wish for you – and me – a meaningful, purposeful new year, and a story worth telling at the end of it. With a happy ending.