Redefinitions

I asked someone once if he were happy. “I’m not unhappy,” he responded. At that time, I thought his answer was sad. Where was joy, elatedness, contentment? If you weren’t unhappy, weren’t you happy? What kind of scale did he use to measure his life?

Lately, I’ve been thinking about happiness and how to define it. It seems that I’ve given a lot of power to other people when it comes to how I feel. Give me a little praise and I’m like a lap dog panting for more. Say I look like I’ve lost weight, and I’m your friend for life. Sadly, I’ve given even more power to the nasty ones--the wicked, rude, mean human replicas that sabotage good feelings and who were the authors of my life’s chapter and paragraph. They defined if I were happy or not or if my day was good or bad. But, I’m not going to let them write my book any more.

Once if you asked if I were happy, I might say yes if it was day lived in the absence of destruction and terror and gloom. Or if I successfully turned my back and shunned the people who did not evoke joy, then I also would be happy. After all, happy is the opposite of sad. Good the opposite of bad. Right the opposite of wrong.

Life doesn’t work that way though. I’ve learned that manipulative people, by nature, will manipulate. Liars will lie. The corrupt will find ways to burrow like chiggers into the skin of the innocent. Not to me. Not anymore. I’ve taken the power back and use it to stand in the same room with the wretched and understand their evil and not let it touch me. I let their falsehoods bounce off me and reabsorb in their heartless body shells. I've accepted the reality that these people exist and live on the planet.

Somewhere in regaining power, I’ve redefined happiness. Somewhere in this game we call life, emotions live in the grey between black and white. Happiness is not the joyous height of euphoria that comes from surviving a life altering event or the mere absence of those who cause heartburn. Sadness is not the blank feelings of those pondering suicide. In between the extremes, there is not an abyss. In the space where the pendulum swings, it stills in a place that one person defines as not unhappy, another; peace and another; simply good.

I’ve believed that life was about swinging from trees on vines that never break jumping away from bad and into good. I’ve spent decades climbing from threat and into a peaceful canopy. I now realize that sometimes the vine breaks and I land smack in the middle of life. This event is not a catastrophe plunging me into the depths of dispair and misery. It doesn’t have to be defined or categorized. It doesn’t have to fit someone else’s definition. It’s enough to simply be alive. Every once in a while, I may find myself staring down someone whose weak vine dropped them into my world at the same time, but I have the power to walk away. They are not going to change my day or define my life. They are not going to control my emotions. Each day is an adventure and I don’t know if I will be unhappy, happy or perhaps feel something different, but it’s mine to define…mine to feel…mine to own.

In the distant past, after encountering the wicked, I would run home crying and be miserable. In the recent past, I might run away screaming over my back, “Adios, sucker. Sayonara, Satan’s seed. Au Revoir, insipid idiot.” Today, I might just say Goodbye as I slowly walk away and breathe in all the emotions that life offers which cannot be weighed and measured on a scale.