So are you happy?

Someone who is very near to me is unhappy. That is the only way this person can describe how they feel, and they don't know what they can do about it. Being ME my first urge is to try and make them happier, but then I have to ask myself;

"How can I make someone else happy when I am not sure what happiness is?"

Charles Schultz said happiness is a warm Puppy
The Beatles say that Happiness is a warm gun
Dennis Leary says that Happiness is momentary, that is is a beer or a warm cookie or a ten second orgasm.
George Carlin talks about the expression "More than happy" as being a metaphor for insanity ("We had to put Bill away...he was...uh... MORE than HAPPY!").

I have asked several people I know if they were happy and the responses ran the gamut from "I will live" to "I guess so". No one was every absolutely sure if they were, some seemed to know what it was though.

Emotions are like looking at mugshots in a book, you are never quite sure what they are until you see them, or find them. If you are lucky when you do find them they are so OBVIOUS to you they you feel like a dope that you never spotted them. I have felt that way about love ever since I met my current Girl Friend, like everyone else I had used the world but the taste of it on my tongue was never quite complete until we met.

I guess my feelings about happiness these days are like working in pastels, there is no absolute. When I work in pastels I always work on a colored paper, a mid ground color that supplies the visual yardstick for the dark of shadows and the light of highlights. That mid tone, that grey, is where we live out lives. When we are sad or depressed the hues tend to darken as the blackness takes us for awhile and we fall into a pit, when we are excited or happy the colors brighten and we are shifted towards radiance.

The thing we have to remember though is a simple thing I noticed a long time ago...we have to stop looking at our shoes and look at the stars. I came to this conclusion one day while watching people on the street bustling to and fro. It was a pleasant California afternoon and the weather was mild but I noticed so many of the people I was watching were shuffling their feet along with their heads down and their backs arched against the chilled wind of an imaginary storm. Their were also a few looking totally skyward, but a lot of them seemed of the "just visiting this word for a day, leave a message" variety.

Then there were the people who fixed their gazed foreword, as if they could see not only the taxi stand they were heading for but the end of the day and the joys that is promised. As if those moments of happiness were a tangible thing, a fleshed out and real as the doorman who opened the cab door for them. They weren't looking down, closing out all the people around them, or looking to the heavens as if they could avoid all life's pain and woes by ignoring it. Those people were living NOW but looking for THEN. THEN is where they get to taste that little bit of nectar we call happiness.

I understand that simply looking at the stars is not the answer all the time, we cannot ascend to an astral plane and hope to pay the rent, but when we are at our lowest that is the time we need to turn our eyes heavenward. The only way to get out of a hole is raise our eyes towards the goals that will give us the happiness we want. In the light of their promise we will find the handholds that might just get us to where we want to be.

At least for awhile.