That Which Is Lost

Few people act as if they believe me when I tell them this: I have rarely been happy in my life. I know other people who felt they have problems with depression, but even they did not seem to understand when I would say, “I’ve never been happy.” One friend took a rebirthing class, and reported she experienced deep happiness, the kind she had only felt in childhood. I must have been an anxious baby, anxious in the womb. Happiness was a word I had no context for. Even in the most pleasant, the most fortunate of circumstances, I skittered on the surface of enjoyment, with my footing unsure on the edge of a chasm. Another friend in the upheavals of peri-menopause chemical surges said, “Every time I go out the door, I feel like I have stage fright. I don’t see how people live with this.” My friend was often angry or wary. I had not noticed happiness to be her dominant trait, but even she had known life without that amorphous cloud in the sacral chakra. I was astounded. Perhaps happiness was not an emotion, like the emperor’s new clothes, everyone else was faking.

The search for happiness has been the impetus for my entire squandered life. First I wanted to fit in the bosom of my family, then be a best friend, then have a boyfriend, interspersed and followed by self-help and how-tos, then spirituality, seeking the God Who Would Save Me from Myself. Perhaps I equated love and competence with happiness, but somehow, no matter how I was petted or praised, both seemed illusively out of my grasp, perhaps because I was constantly dancing for approval from someone else, while myopically focused on my frantic steps.

After years of pleading, bargaining, practicing, failing, maintaining, I began to have breakthroughs. On occasions, sometimes for a couple of days at a time, I was not unhappy. I was actually timorously optimistic. Sometimes, usually with someone who was in a state more angsted than mine, I was confident and calm. But not happy. I simply had no reference for happy.

Then one day while I was taking care of my paralyzed father, a stranger in a check-out line began to berate me, telling me how stupid I was. In my frazzled and frumpy existence, I had no trouble believing him, but I had been working on the concept of peace, the peace that passeth understanding, and I just wanted to pay for my goods and take my fatigue home. I had to call on God, and not very nicely, to handle the situation. Then a strange thing happened. My tormentor gleamed like honey. The store was suffused in an amber glow, a heavenly golden light. And from somewhere, not from me, but like a sea that had birth me, Laughter…. I have no words for it. I, the angry young man, his harried mother, the weary check-out clerk, the shoppers, we were all loved and supported by Laughter, and we were of It and It was of us. Nothing else changed, except I was at peace, and I was happy. I was of Happiness, Who had just shared a marvelous joke with me.

Though there were good moments after, Happiness did not reappear until two years later when I was trapped in the car with a woman with whom I had formed a contentious bond, a woman with whom I spoke more sharply than any other person in my life, a woman whom I was constantly telling she was Wrong. If I had not had hardening of the arteries, I would have left most encounters with her with a migraine. Still we were called together, and on this day, my spiritual lesson was “God’s will for you is perfect happiness.” Like magnets , we had been drawn into a difference of opinion that finally resulted in war. “You,” I hissed to the God of Lies who promised me happiness, “You need to fix this, because I cannot,” because she and I were broken, and even if we separated, we would be infected and could not expel the deadly toxin.

Then she spoke softly, discussing the meal we had just shared. And when I heard the music of her voice, I also noticed the amber glow enveloping us. I felt the leap of Laughter. I knew, once again, I was home, and I was glad. My friend, the Saint, and I could not go back and repair the damage done, for in that instant there was no damage. There was only Now.

The Laughter and Heaven’s glow ebbed, but I carried its memory everywhere, for I now knew happiness was real, and I expected to meet it again. Several months later I was sitting on my couch, watching a silly movie with my husband, when I noticed a weird feeling. Something was different. I checked out my body, part by part, until I realized the cloud of anxiety in my belly wasn’t present. Then I recognized the amber glow. Nothing was happening, and I was happy.

It lasted for a day. The following afternoon I felt something was slightly amiss. I realized I was missing the anxiety I had lived with for fifty-four years, as if a difficult family member had suddenly disappeared even though nobody had been fighting. By night, my sacral chakra was cloudy again. This was not what I wanted, even if somehow I had chosen it, chosen it in the womb, or some other life time ago, by some habitual action.

But I have learned, happiness is not the result of anything I do, or anything anyone else can do for me. It is the Eternal Source of my being. God is Love. God is Happiness. And though I have chosen to think I have been the source of my own happiness, though I’ve always failed miserably in achieving it, I can choose again, every day. I can choose to let Someone choose for me. And In Love, in Laughter, I know I am at Home, where Peace passeth all understanding. One day I will know it, forever.