Still Happy
Had a conversation the other day with a friend who had a tough year in 2022—lost his dad and suffered with long COVID. He’s feeling better now, and we talked about that journey to better. How it had a lot of false starts and every time he thought he’d turned a corner, there was another corner, and everything just kept on going and going, grief and sickness taking turns battering his soul and body.
I could actually commiserate, and he knew it because he knew my wife and he knew what I’d been through or was going through, because we laughed about the idea of turning corners only to discover grief was a polyhedron with an infinite number of corners. So, you never quite got out of it, you simply got used to it. And that got me thinking about yesterday’s words when I talked about being happy again, because I realized I’d encountered similar milestones in the last year or so.
That didn’t change my feelings, however, because they’re real and I still feel happy, but it made me realize that maybe happiness isn’t the goal but simply a nice phase I’m going through with the possibility of more to come, because more did come. And of course, there’s the flip side of that coin, sadness, because there’s always the possibility it’s right around one of those corners. And that brought me neatly back to idea of living in the now and enjoying what I have and to stop worrying about what might be around the next corner.