Happiness…

Is a noun. With a fairly long history, like the rock and brick walls around a medieval city–These walls are in a state of disrepair and attempts at fixing them lead to arguments about how they are to be fixed while still maintaining something of their ancient character.

Is an idea. But one whose meaning is certainly debatable. Is it putting up drywall in your house for someone to paint later? Is it putting on a pair of new shoes that someone bought for you at a thrift store?

Is ultimately a chemical experience that I feel. Where do I feel it? In my head mostly. Sometimes in my lungs after a deep breath when I realize that I have finished a big project that I partly procrastinated on and partly worked diligently at. It is sometimes in my stomach, if the expectation of pleasure meets me on a weekend.

A thing to be touched. Many times I have felt happiness in my son’s face, in my wife’s food, in her smile, and even in kicking a perfectly round ball really, really well into a net or against a brick wall.

Undeniably not sadness. Nor stress. Nor what happens when my gas bill comes in the middle of a wet, cold, blustery winter–when the wind seems to blow right through the cracks in the walls.

What happens when I am feeling stress-free. No tests to grade; nobody waiting for my hard earned money. The sun might be shining. The rain could be pouring. The days could be like those on a lonely flat plain without any tree and where the clouds are like the puffs of breath from a girl in a dress running in a playground on a late summer’s day.

Listening to music.

Watching my son play. He runs sometimes while trying to watch his feet; therefore, he runs at an angle–not straight on–his unbuttoned coat flapping like a cape behind him (he hasn’t quite experienced the happiness of zipping it up himself, yet).

Is a passing feeling. Soon after happiness has passed, I’m happily relishing in the reality of its having come and gone, like a friend in whose company I feel very comfortable, who has just said a fitting goodbye and has left with a smile on his satisfied countenance. I, too, am smiling. This is called follow-up happiness or afterward happiness.

Some look in the mirror and feel an extraordinarily deep happiness. They are happy with their skin coloring, the shape of their eyes, the way their cheekbones meet their temples which meet their forehead which meets the first strands of their lustrous jet black hair which falls just to the top of their well-plucked eyebrows.

Some edit and feel happiness. (I’m one of them.) Like changing one of the thes to an a in the second sentence. I had written it by accident.

Service. One time I stood up and gave my seat to an elderly man. His cheeks were like a brick street slowly sunk by the wheels of trucks; his eyes like wet marbles, his unshaven face like an abandoned construction site strewn everywhere with debris; and there were remnants of some sauce, coloring the corners of his mouth. He said something unintelligible, but I gave him the seat anyway.

Happiness is eternal and reachable forever: apparently, heaven is where (according to the ideas of people two thousand years ago) I’ll live and work without tears. Without stress. Without guilt. In heaven, the faucets of happiness are always turned on and from those fountains people of every tongue drink and drink and drink. And after the first drink, they are happier than they’ve ever been, and yet they drink for the sake of relishing in that first happiness and repeating that experience over and over for days on end.