You're happy. You look happy, she says. I do? Oh. Well... yes, hmm, I guess I am. You're sure I do?

It's one of those things - you can't fuss over it. Sometimes I get so thoroughly sick of myself. Some say the unexamined life is not worth living. But you can be happy without knowing it. It's the only possible way, really. You can't dissect or explain or categorise it. It is exactly this constant need for rationalisation, introspection, verification and justification - essentially for control - that continually threatens to overwhelm and undermine. If you cannot stick it in a test-tube and poke at it and reproduce it at will then it can't possibly be enough, it can't possibly be real, and it cannot last. So don't allow yourself to get used to it.

And the days are not full enough
And the nights are not full enough
And life slips by like a field mouse
Not shaking the grass.

Ezra Pound

It's nonsense, really. Sometimes it just hits you, and it's difficult to describe it to others (happiness is less contagious than we might have hoped), and it's because you don't know where it comes from, you don't know when it'll disappear, half the time you don't even realise that hey, the world isn't suddenly strangely, gloriously luminous today - it's just me. I'm happy, that's why. But leave it at that. Don't let the why overtake the happy; don't let the shadow of yourself catch up.



It is as Steinbeck writes:

Sometimes a kind of glory lights up the mind of a man. It happens to nearly everyone. You can feel it growing or preparing like a fuse burning towards dynamite. It is a feeling in the stomach, a delight of the nerves, of the forearms. The skin tastes the air, and every deep-drawn breath is sweet. Its beginning has the pleasure of a great stretching yawn; it flashes in the brain and the whole world glows outside your eyes.

That is all; and it is more than enough.