Happiness is ..

.. where time stops?

Not friends, food, fame, fortune
Timelessness in life's essence -
Happiness begins.

Happiness ~ the universal quest, mankind's prayer, individual obsession, effort's engine .. the natural resting place of children.

Only a silver thread keeps my host trudging stoically to a grave I suspect his body will reach long after his mind. He enjoys moments of rare serenity, but is mostly unhappy, the child within almost gone.

This dimension to their living, revered wise ones, I find most sad. Happiness fades with childhood, emptiness then their haunting companion. Outwardly brave, and endlessly distracted, their orphaned inner infant persists a plangent Munchian Scream.

My 'traveling companion' is a forlorn and beaten person hanging by bloodied fingertips to the wheels of commerce that, while feeding him, endlessly threaten to mash his expendable body and drop it worthless, maybe lifeless, as aging jobless social trash at enterprise's wayside.

Too old for hope, too smart for contentment; his body, fed and comfortable, carries a mind imprisoned, tortured, by dejections's agony; dolor tinged with fear, not of imminent violently-cruel demise but of inevitable lonely decay.

Poignantly, and ironically, I notice he is saddest when most happy. The greater the heights of appreciation, more is sorrow magnified at its inevitable demise.

Buddha knew this lesson well.

I sometimes see flashes of calm, brief gasping surges of joy. Shallow sallow shadows of his adolescent peak experiences they might be, yet the soul revives a little, urged on by this feeble joyous recall.

Beloved parents, insight glimmers on this facet of the human condition: their happiness, and why it goes away.

As tiny children they are, when not in physical torment, universally happy. Like non-sentient animals, resilient, unjudging, accepting, innocent, brilliant mimics, intuitive scientists ... and resoundingly ever so happy.

Before learning of time and feeling its passage young children enjoy a timeless paradise of imagination. The real world affects their bodies, often shockingly, but their minds scurry to an immaterial womb of security, a personal world crafted from timeless imagination. An embryonic, controlled model of external harshness sensed and filtered by their body is transformed by supreme curiosity and wonder to a magic personal universe.

Years of harassment eventually wears them down to miserable, confused, non-individuals. Their core of beauty and promise crushed, they become aberrations and caricatures of their potential - this stage known as adolescence.

Training completed - adulthood - leaves them trapped in a survival game whose prime rule is to move through a poorly-modeled construct called "time," living either in the future, planning and worrying - or in the past, mostly regretting.

Nirvana, here, now, the eternal moment, is stitched from reality and less than null. Everything they once were now denied, erased, obliterated. They are carrierless, double-sideband creatures who could reconstruct their essence if only they knew it was gone.

Only the strongest thinkers elude the roundup, the rest condemned to a life of endless distraction, trite, total despair, or psychosis.

Ironically, everyone experiences happiness yet none see its source.

Blissful episodes decrease through adulthood, increasingly unremarkable, unmemorable and less intense. Like dreams, moments of joy, delight or euphoria, are quickly and habitually snuffed upon exit, shuffled out of sight, out of mind.

Children store a vast personal library of jubilant imagery. They feed their young souls on this deep sparkling pool of nirvana. Suddenly one day, like a crusading missionary and almost as stupid, adults cement an ugly lid upon this pool and forbid the child from drinking.

You must, they exhort (insanely, as a farmer spraying poison on his crops before harvest) search for pools 'in the future'; you must depart now on an eternal, futile quest for hypothetical wellsprings of well being.

Everyone's bright pool of timeless rapture lies beneath their dark thoughts, covered by nothing more than the cerebral equivalent of tissue paper.

Forgive them, my fine distingue mentors. All humans live trapped in the proverbial wet paper bag, that a mere finger of thought gently prodding would tear apart, revealing ...

Almost none seek to escape - or indeed seem aware they can.

It's been a while since I wrote, dear parents. Though keen to tap out my latest musings I have been paralyzed pondering yet another Eureka Moment.

With my host - to casual readers I hasten to explain - the relationship is intellectual or programmic, as though your brain's non-verbal hemisphere housed an ephemeral visitor. Neither body-snatcher nor parasite, though that normally defines uninvited boarders, he hears my thoughts and believes them his own.

My symbiotic foothold is ensured by that common lapse of the universal constructor - all too frequent a lapse to be an oversight - that disrupts their thinking patterns when the 'internal monologue' detects complaisant repetition.

Folk of such mind do not allow, indeed cannot accept, consensus reality - or is that consensus delusion? - as an end in itself, as the arbiter of ultimate meaning.

Their paper bag is torn, leaking a little, and unknowing of their strength fail to shred and shed the container. Life persists unaccepting, doubtful, unwittingly entranced by inklings of other reality.

Through this fissure in their minds I greet you.