In the chill of an early Fall this past year, I found myself in a moment that held me captive. It wasn't some kind of esoteric, layered thing where I felt the need to analyze. Instead, there was this sense that I was coming to terms with the greater mysteries of my life, those quiet aspects of myself that I mostly leave to the recesses of my sub conscious. These were the big, huge underlying questions we're so afraid to ask ourselves. The biggest being AM I HAPPY?
That's the toughest question there is. It's easy to sum things up, count enough blessings to outweigh the curses, and say yes. But that's not really it, is it? There's so much more to that question, so much more to what true, undulated happiness really is, where the innocence of childhood kept the big terrible truth of this world locked away in the bliss of Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. This was back when God was uncomplicated, before the theological debates of tired old men challenged us to take sides. This was when the wind on your face and the sand between your toes was all you needed to form a true smile, something not forced by convention.
All at once, we're asked to grow up, to choose a news station we can trust, read off a preferred book list, date a certain variety of woman or man. It's all pre-concieved, this sense of lost purpose evacuated by intelligence. We're all waiting on the moment where we can finally say "Ah hah, happiness achieved".
That moment isn't necessarily a realistic conquest. Happiness is, for the most part, an emotion. It was an emotion when we were kids too. That's important to understand. Kid's have limited mental faculties. Logic and reason are still mostly in the immediately post embryonic stage at 7 to 12 years old. Emotions, for better or worse, are all kids have to go on. So happiness, to a kid, is as simple as getting a kiss from ones secret crush or passing the spelling test. As kids, those things were all it took to feel flawlessly happy.
As adults, we know how terrible the world is. We know how selfish we are. All these things that adults hid from us as children are all too soon directly in our face, challenging us, pushing us, angrily asking for time, money, sex, opinions and rain checks. And there really wasn't a transition stage from A to B. Our teen years were melodramatic, a long, badly written Dawsons Creek marathon. They served to make us even more confused, toiling with our self esteem and stoking the fires of our burgeoning tempers. But time reveals the occasional answer.
As I stood there, October wind at my cheeks, this moment I spoke of earlier came like a revelation in the dark. It was this sudden sense that the answer to many of these questions would never fully materialize. That, in and of itself, is an answer of sorts. I will always find sorrow in life. I will always find joy in life. Sometimes, I might even find one within the other. The point is, life is not about easy answers. It's how we find our answers, the process of what we go through to get to that place. We will spend our whole lives defining who we are...and asking questions.
Something's I don't question. I don't question my faith or my ambitions or my dreams. I know what I believe and I know what I was put here to do. Those things are in stone.
I question politicians, moments, ideas, sins, successes, insults, obituaries, books, myself, the media, liberals, conservatives, women, children and men. I question these things because I don't have all the answers yet. I'm just beginning to think I don't care if I ever do. But man, I love sure do love asking.
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