Happiness
Posted by Daniel Lyons Mon, 28 Aug 2006 19:24:00 GMT
I wrote this a couple years ago:
I have come to the conclusion that the sensation of happiness has absolutely no correlation to whether or not a person deserves to feel happy, or their life is going well, or any other factor. It just doesn’t seem to be related to the atmospheric or environmental condition of the moment at all.
People come out of a phase of their life steeped in the emotion of that time. Slowly it may leave if the new phase finds them steeped in new, different emotions. It feels false for a while, but slowly that sensation goes away. You always have nostalgia for the previous phase. Maybe you go back even further than that… I’m not sure if it’s a good thing or a bad thing.
When I was leaving high school I was deadly afraid of leaving my clan. When I got to college, I quickly had a new clan which has surpassed my notions of clandom by quite a bit. But I still occasionally feel nostalgic about it, even though it was only borderline-satisfying. But it was a sensation of happiness.
We always look forward to the moment when all the conditions will be met for us to be happy, thinking “I’ll be happy at that moment!” In reality, we have to spend some time in that moment, maybe even leave that moment and come back, before we really are truly happy.
