Happiness is being transported out of yourself, out of ordinary life. It doesn’t mean you’re removed from the ordinary world, but that you transcend it. You are on a plane of existence where it’s OK to be silly, or tearful, or bubbling over with laughter. Effervescence is OK when you’re happy.
It’s the magic of drinking starlight and the warmth of drinking sunlight. A golden froth that burns low inside you, humming in every part of your being until you have to jump, or smile, to look ahead because you can’t and don’t want to keep it inside yourself. You’re lighter; so light you can float, or dance, or fly. Happiness is electrifying because it intensifies all that is wondrous and gently releases all that is painful or upsetting.
We are truly blessed that we can be happy, and those who cannot recognize happiness are truly cursed. It is the world’s most simple healer, a balm to anything and everything. Happiness connects us; it’s something inside of us that says “Yes, I’m here. Yes, I am. Yes. Thank you.”
There’s truth in those cliched adages you hear as you go through life: Standing on top of the world; Jumping for joy. I have stood on top of the world; I have jumped for joy (though I never imagined it was possible). I have been so happy I’ve jettisoned all dignity and spun in circles until I fell over just because the sun was shining, because I was with my friends, because I was.
Those of us who radiate happiness have the power to summon it in others. I read a saying once on the inside of a public bathroom stall that said, “If you see someone without a smile, give them one of yours.”
Happiness and fulfillment aren’t the same, but they can walk hand in hand like siblings. For me, the distinction between happiness and fulfillment is one of people: when I’m happy, there’s always a person involved. My crush smiled at me, my friend hugged me for no reason I could think of, a baby waved and laughed when he saw me, or my favorite TV characters got together. I am fulfilled when I complete something; when I can stand back and say that I’m satisfied, or when others are satisfied. I am fulfilled when I can make a positive change in my surroundings, but I am happy when I can make a positive change in a person around me. So you see how happiness and fulfillment are complements, and how often we feel both, together, to the point where we begin to think them inseparable.
Life hurts. Happiness is the compensation for – the other side of – that pain. We lose people and things every day: sometimes to Death, sometimes to Time, sometimes to just the ordinary process of living. But happiness pulls us back together like a mooring line, preventing us from drifting so far apart we can find nothing to share. When a smile no longer can gently lift the film of reality from another’s perspective then we’ll know that we’ve gone too far and the human experience has become so microscopic in scale we no longer see each other as a race, as a species.
The sensations of happiness, the invocation of that brightness of spirit and self by something or someone else – is transcendent across borders and nationalities and cultures: all humans, everywhere, that have ever come before and will ever come after, have felt that. We have all drunk the sun-and-starlight potion of joy. And that we have keeps us together when free will, when God or fate or chaos theory contrives to pull us all apart. Haven’t you had that sense, when you’re happy, that you can do anything, be anyone, overcome any impediment before you? I have. Happiness makes men and women mightier than gods, more powerful than any construction of faith or will or science. In happiness, we are invincible.
WolfGrrl
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