Do you ever get those moments where you feel the sun glowing on your face, or when you watch someone you love and they don’t notice, but you get a warm rush from their unexpected adorableness?
I find myself stumble across moments like these. Little blebs of happiness, popping up unexpectedly, while I’m busy trying to be important and productive. Yet if I go looking for them on purpose, they are notoriously difficult to find. The thing that seems to make them so good, is that they just happen by accident.
I couldn’t tell you what events and feelings align to make them happen or give you a list of instructions so you could concoct one yourself. I could give you a few more examples of when they happen though. Maybe that’d be helpful?
Sometimes they happen when I wake up before the sun rises to walk my dogs and watch them frolic through the long grass, relishing in a taste of freedom from the predictable back yard. Sometimes they happen, when I say goodbye to friends after a night of banter and laughs and stand at the end of my driveway, listening to the looming quiet that settles on the street, once the noise of their cars trails away. Sometimes they happen when I sit on a bus, gazing out the window, listening to a song that just seems to put so much into words that I had never managed to. Sometimes, they happen when I watch my husband and feel the need to squirm, because all the love I have for him, needs to gush out at once. Sometimes they happen when I’m talking with my kids, and the light reflects off their hair and I’m suddenly taken aback by how beautiful they seem, both inside and out.
In these moments, the world just seems to make sense. In all the messiness and unpredictable, it’s like a little moment of perfection, where all things, even if just for a very brief moment, seem to thrum with some contended sense of euphoria. I’m flooded by this rare awareness that everything’s going to be ok. That despite all the unbearable grief there is, the sometimes inexplicable, ruthlessness of nature and the dreary feeling of empty, repetitiveness that can trickle in, things will be ok in the end. If those little moments are possible sometimes, there is surely always hope that they can pop up again.
What are these moments? What is it that causes these happy accidents, where we find ourselves so unexpectedly content? Where does the wave of feeling come from and where does it go? It seems that when I ask too many questions about them and try make sense of them, I inadvertently, push them away.
Doesn’t that always seem the way with things irrationally beautiful and precious? You can’t concoct them, or control them, or predict them and if you try, they evade you.
They almost remind me of those cheeky sprites in European mythology, that so many people claimed to have seen twinkle out of the corner of their eye, but could never capture. While I don’t believe that there are such ethereal fairies in our midsts, and understand full well the irrational superstitions of ancient fairy tales, there seems some commonality in the human experience that beauty and happiness are evanescent and untameable. Perhaps it is our inability to ever truly capture them, that makes them so blissful.
While I am so grateful for the birth of reasoning and development of the sciences and find understanding as liberating as any of us would. When I have moments of accidental happiness, of unexplained beauty, I quite enjoy that it is one of the few times, that thinking fails, and just being, prevails.
I think the less obsessed we are about controlling, predicting, or maintaining happiness, the more we will find it.
Don’t have beautiful and happy moments
, instead, let them have you. Breathe them in, graciously let them fade and enjoy the longing and unpredictability of when they will return.
If you think about them too much, they go away.
Till next time,
The Reformist Princess
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