It’s easy to have something to say when you’re down. That’s really the only time I have had much of anything worth reading if you ask me. And I’ll tell you what, when I’ve got something to say I make sure it gets said, although most of it turns out to be a meditation rather than something explicit. But why is that? I suppose the overt answer is that when I’m not down I don’t feel like what I have to say has any strength behind it. The Voice speaks clearly when there isn’t shit else to get in its way beside misery and self-deprecation.
But I suppose also that when I’m “up” I don’t find anything to talk about. Suddenly, a veil falls in front of my eyes like a mystical fallacy. I’m seeing through the world as “I’ve always seen it”, and so there isn’t anything to talk about. It’s as though my happiness itself is a shroud of ignorance, a pattern of behavior that predates my developed consciousness. Imbedded in that happiness is a program, a lesson I’ve learned over and over again: happiness is something to be cherished, not questioned.
I find myself questioning things all the time. Most of them tend to be morose, deeply philosophical, musical or artistic, but never strictly positive. Why? I mean to get to what I was saying before it doesn’t surprise me that I don’t write when I’m happy. When my life is wrought with despair, and the way back to the surface where the equilibrium dwells can’t be found, I kneel down in the dark pit of my awareness and scream, “WHY?!” But when I am happy, I am happy and stupid and carefree and my concern for whether or not it will stick around is somewhere else, having a beer with sadness until happiness walks through the door of the Emotion Saloon.
Sadness, anger, gloom, all of these make pensive company. It is said that it is easier to negate the value of something than it is to explain why it has any value in the first place. Happiness is a demanding partner, sadness is a partner in crime.
What are the demands of happiness? What does it look for in a friend? Why is it so hard to please to keep it around? Even better, what does happiness have to say that is meaningful, and more-or-less free of high fructose corn syrup?
Happiness demands attention, but not the kind of seething tide that attracts the others. No, happiness demands simply that you acknowledge its presence in the room regularly. That it is here, and you know that, seems to be enough for it. At least on one level. It also seems to sit and wait with a smug look on its face. It’s a face that asks a question you cannot speak. The kinds of questions that you know are being asked, and that you avoid answering by saying, “What?” with a snarled lip and a half-hearted chuckle. It just is.
The face asks if you know where it came from. It asks if you know why it is there, or what you did to get it to walk through the door. It asks you why you are worth being around. And I think that many of us, myself especially included, stop and can’t express why we are worth it. We don’t know why we feel its presence or what we did to make it feel welcome. And so, with a smile, it gets up, and leaves, and the moments between its exit and the other’s entrance are a void that nobody remembers. It is the stasis of thought and emotion, like a space between spaces, where nothing but it in itself can be said to exist.
I can’t honestly say that I know for sure what that place is. Maybe the reason why this whole piece is a figurative question, drawn out liberally to appease the ghost of Dickens peering over my shoulder, is because I am in this moment, this zone of being. Maybe this whole piece is a reporting from the land of in-between feelings. And maybe that’s also the reason why I suddenly feel like this whole thing has drastically moved off topic from what I was originally thinking about.
Because I don’t feel happy right now, but neither do I feel sad. I don’t feel content and I don’t feel wretched. I feel overstuffed because of the hot wings I gorged myself on earlier. I feel worried about all the things I feel that I have to do, but that aren’t actually a problem because my capability to get them done far exceeds the amount of faith I have in myself. I feel trapped within the nexus of feeling, or else in the maelstrom of it. Like a leaf being blown around in a hurricane—sometimes in the arms, sometimes the eye, but always concerned only with the fact that the ground is something I don’t want to rest on.
I don’t think it’s necessary to be down in order to say something meaningful. I think it’s more important to know where you are, and to be able to say whatever you feel from that moment. To imagine yourself in an environment that reflects your thoughts and feelings of the now, and to mold a replica of that place out of the tools you have and have developed. Then, when happiness is in the room, you have a way of asking it unaskable questions in response to its unanswerable ones. Maybe then, it’ll stick around for longer, and maybe, if you’re lucky, it’ll even stay in the room with you when your sadness comes for an extended visit.
