Happiness is a strange little bastard.

Happiness is a strange little bastard.

Damn. The older I get — and the more days I quietly stack onto my time here on this tiny spinning rock — the more I realize that chasing happiness is a little like chasing pink, fluffy clouds. From far away they look soft and perfect, almost designed for you to run toward them. But at some point the sky changes. The clouds grow heavy. And sooner or later it starts to rain.

And when it rains, there isn’t much you can do about it.

You can hold an umbrella. Or you can dance in it.

I’m not much of a dancer. But I do like to get wet!

The truth is, I am happy. I think I always have been, in some quiet stubborn way. But for every happy day I’ve lived, there have also been days — weeks, sometimes even months — where I felt empty inside. Run down. Tired. Annoyed. Beaten up by the weight of things I couldn’t quite bare. A little sadness never killed anyone. In fact, it sharpens the colors.

And I suppose that’s part of the deal. We humans have this unfortunate habit of needing the dark to recognize the light. The bitter so we can taste the sweet. Without it, happiness might just drift by unnoticed, like a warm breeze through an open window.

Waiting for happiness will never make you happy;

We wait for the right time;
We wait until things settle down;
We wait until we’re ready;

We wait to say what matters;
We wait to live the life we quietly imagine;

And all the while, time slips past us like water through open fingers;

Don’t waste your time waiting;

I’ve realized something over the years. I don’t actually want to be happy all the time. In fact, I don’t trust people who are. Either they’re lying or they’re not paying attention. There’s something honest about melancholy. It slows the world down. Colors get deeper, music sounds better, even the air feels heavier in a way that makes you notice it.

Not the kind of suffering that breaks a man. Just the quiet kind. The kind that reminds you that you cared about something enough to miss it. That you dreamed big enough for it to hurt a little when it slips away.

There’s a strange romance in that. Maybe that’s the trick to living well. 

Not chasing happiness like it’s some permanent address, but learning to hold both things at once;

the sun and the rain, the laughter of a long summer evening and the quiet sadness that follows it.

J.