Happiness is for idiots

and other things I used to believe

I have a confession to make. I am deeply uncomfortable writing about happiness. Somewhere in my young years, I developed a deep suspicion of any one who was parading their happiness around (church ladies, I was looking at you!) I was like Kevin Kleins character in the 90’s rom com French Kiss says to Meg Ryan, “anytime someone tells me they’re happy, my ass begins to twitch.” Now I can’t say I totally understood what he was talking about there but I heartily agreed with the sentiment.

What is wrong with happy people you may ask? I may be dating myself as a wannabe gen Xer when I say, there is a part of me, that just didn’t believe that anyone with half a brain could be happy in a world like ours. I don’t need to name the horrors. You likely hear about them everyday! How could one know about these things and claim to be happy? What gated community has one sealed themselves off in where the suffering of the world doesn’t touch you?

If you are presuming that I was cynical and often depressed in my teens, you would be right! My generation grew up imaging the future filled with flying cars and gas masks, of forests on fire and robots. It is slightly terrifying to be living into our possible extinction and not even get to hovercraft to work.

Thankfully, I was given the chance to mature into middling age and happiness had the time to make its case. I would have to walk through some very difficult, often heart breaking things to appreciate it, but Happiness is patient, and like the air, not going anywhere, despite the smoke I blow into its face.

There are many things I have failed at becoming in my life, a ballet dancer for starters. When I was 14 I knew beyond a doubt what I wanted for my life, and it was dance. I was in the studio 6 days a week. I slept through my high school classes and barely passed math and science, but I could dance! and dance was all I needed. Shockingly to me in one of those sneaky life plot twists, I became a mom instead and left my dance dreams when I had my son in my early 20’s. I was the first time I experienced life giving me not what I wanted, but what I needed to be the person I had the potential to become. It was at the time, the most jarring transition. From performing to diapers. But even then, in my waves of grief of the dreams forever unfilled, I knew something important was happening.

I’ve come to believe that it’s not the what we do, but the how. That life is very unpredictable and out of our control and that dosen’t have to be a bad thing. The person you are becoming is being developed in every twist and turn.

I knew from a young age that I didn’t want half of a life, no toxic positivity for me! I was greedy, and wanted it all. Honesty, nakedness and authenticity. I didn’t understand then, that darkness wasn’t personal and that suffering wasn’t a sign of failing (or moral standing?) but instead an opportunity to experience being alive.

To be alive is a very serious thing, the spectrum of what one can experience is endless, both in the tragic and exalted. Here is where happiness is began making its case.

After my mom died in 2021, I thought I would never be happy again.

This sounds dramatic maybe but I just could not imagine a time, ever again, where I could live in this world, this would where my mom is dead and feel happy. I could feel okay, some pleasure maybe, joy was even on the table but happy? That felt like something reserved for my old life, where she was alive.

However the mornings kept arriving, relentlessly, like ocean waves. A new day, and then another, and another, and in those days, life pulled me back into its current. I resisted this of course. Wouldn’t you? I hate being told what to do, and if I’m in a mood I really hate being told it will pass. I didn’t want it to pass, I wanted my mom.

Alas, here are the Rolling Stones in the back ground singing, you can’t always get what you want, even if what you want is to sit in your grief and never be bothered by life again.

The other day, I was walking my dog in the forest by our house. Tall cedars and firs over head, frogs chirping in the distance and bright pink salmon berry flowers blooming by the trail. Yes, it might have also been sunny.

Watching the bright wag of my dogs white tail I breathed in the fresh spring air and thought about my mom. I imagined sharing this perfect quiet moment with her, how my love for her filled my nose and my lungs and how god damned happy that made me.

I stopped for a moment in shock, my whole body vibrating with the joy of the life I have been given. My family and dog and my strong healthy body, my brain that writes poetry and my heart on fire, more blessings than one deserves.

Happy, I was so happy.

Picture said middling woman whooping for joy alone in the forest loving her dead mom and life and all the days it took to get there, she may have even kissed a flower or two.

Before my mom died, I was so afraid to admit to being happy.

Who was I to be happy when the horrors persist? Who was I to whoop in the forest when there are places being bombed? Who was I in my young motherhood bursting with happiness with my kids when so many others could not?

Now I know better.

After my experience in the dark, I will try to never be ashamed of my happiness again for I know how rare and fleeting it is. How like grace, it is not deserved but offered like a gift, and like a gift is something to be savoured knowing it will not last.

When happiness visits others, when it shines on them, when life is going right, I will bask in that joy too. I will retire the cynic who is afraid to be stupid and choose to be amazed by this great unpredictable life instead.

This wounded world needs our happiness, may it spread like bad news and give us the hope we need to meet another day.