Dare I Say It?

I was hanging out with Past Tense last night and I couldn't find the right words to explain how I feel. Everything that came to mind seemed utterly cliche: an unerring sense of inner strength, the confidence to move mountains and shatter dominant mores, the peace of mind to Act as oppose to React. I've hit my stride and I'm able to do Everything without fear. I am ashamed of nothing. I do not need to analyze the hell out of everything; I do it, but only out of respect for my writing. Everything is within reach. And for the first time I know without a doubt that this isn't transitory; it's permanent. This feeling that I can do no wrong is Permanent.

Wow. It feels so good to put that out there.

This, my friends, is happiness. It's not the shallow and temporary happiness of a girl who clings onto unstable theories and other peoples' attitudes. It's not the contentment of passing through a phase just to get to another phase. It's not the mania caused by getting myself out of a deep depression. It's a feeling of joy that is stirred by the smallest of details: a conversation on the train with a stranger, the pride that wells in my chest when going to work, the realization that I am not perfect but my attempts at perfection are perfect.

We walked through the streets, Past Tense and I, in a comfortable almost-silence that felt as warm, heavy, and cozy as a favorite overstuffed blanket. The words passing our lips were not the inquisitory ones of other nights, but small morsels of our realities which made little allusion to our late-night think-a-thons: men we were dating, friends, bric-a-brac actions that form the outlines of our day-to-day lives.

Not much had changed on the outside since we'd seen each other last. There were still problems with which to contend: bills, friends, family issues, the issue of finding a soulmate, et al. But progress had been made, and both of us were too mired in our progress to be able to speak on the ins and outs of it. Speaking on your progress while it's happening is like putting the live sports reel on pause to interject a voiceover: sure it helps to put everything in perspective, but there's a halting of the live feed. The main object of the scene - the Progress - seems deterred, deferred, distracted all because you want to convey its parts. The overwhelming sentiment seems real: if you were truly cognizant of what was going on, you wouldn't need the play-by-play. Why not just let it be?

Luckily, Past Tense and I are well versed in this Truth, so we let the live feed continue to grow, and we exhalted in the quiet and relatively relaxing here-and-now.

But "happiness"? The ability to say, "I'm happy"? It seems like part of a fairy tale. We go through our lives striving for something that seems out of reach - this "happiness" we speak so much of - and very rarely do we assess our lives to be Happy. Content? Sure. Complascent? Often, yes. But not Happy. Happy is a tall order. Happy is taken to mean the whole kit and caboodle: job, family, friends, extracurricular activities, health, education, culture - you get the idea. It seems unlikely that one would achieve it all.

But what if all that isn't what makes us happy? What if the assumption that we need "it all" to be happy is incorrect? Or, what if we stumble onto a patch of life as slippery as ice which takes us, sliding, onto a pure and perfect path of happiness, and all of a sudden all of the "necessities of happiness" are ours?

That second one - that's where I'm at. It makes me think: What if we really do need the whole kit and caboodle, but the clincher is that we must be ready and willing to lose it all at any moment? Wouldn't that be a mind fuck? If you could only be perfectly happy if you were sure that you'd be perfectly fine unhappy?

The search for happiness brings to mind a philosophical quandry that had been posed a year ago in class: If you haven't experienced something, how do you know if you've found it? I think I'm going to spend the day thinking about this, while sewing/designing clothes, teaching class, applying to jobs, writing contest entries and poetry, and getting ready to go to the 40/40 club...

With any luck, I'll have a TGL article - my first in almost five months - for you to read by tomorrow.