“Happiness we can only find in ourselves, it is a waste of time to seek for it from others, few have any to spare. Sorrow we have to bear alone as best we can, it is not fair to try to shift it on others, be they men or women. We have to fight our own battles and strike as hard as we can, born fighters as we are.”
― Axel Munthe, THE STORY OF SAN MICHELE
Art – Edward Okun
We are all unhappy people feeding on shines of never-ending stories of happier people around. Are we? Are they?
We are being consumed and trampled over over and over again.
After careful consideration and many well-built walls and some exquisite moats I declare that happiness does not rest with (other) people. Happiness starts with just US.
Yes, people create magic with a mere smile on a windy, bleak, hopeless morning that speeds away with every bit of light. Yet we are tired of being sunned over and then led into a haze of misunderstandings and apprehension…
Still we are totally unhappy and utterly happy in our own world. After bitter disappointments with the people I hold dearest, I place my every happiness in my carefully crafted dome.
“Suffering is one very long moment. We cannot divide it by seasons.” – Oscar Wilde
I divide my happiness by seasons and I season my dome with everything I love and feels warm to the heart. In the aftermath of winter I put my glorious bike trips in the cold into odes to spring – my poems about the coming of the Sun, the ladybirds and the folstitia…One can never write too many invisible stories about spring and hunt too many lilacs.
I have there my beautiful early mornings drenched in autumn rains and also in beautiful snippets of music.
I have there the fairy tale books I read on cold, misty and pointless winter evenings… I have there my every expectation towards spring like a dull root waiting for warmth and birdsong to make it come out into the crude light again.
I can do whatever, I can solve everything, people can blow all their freezing-cold thoughts all over me, still they cannot steal my glow, they can merely break some windows, because I am protected by all of these small beauties awaiting me under my dome.
They say pennies are the mother of pounds. Small, insignificant pleasures like the new moon or a beautiful flower are the mother of happiness.
First you’ve got to see the moon to be over the moon.
Art by Rob Gonsalves.