Happiness

The movie 'Pursuit of Happiness', the American Dream, Being Happy. Everybody wants it and the question of what happiness is, is being answered in as many ways - 'some chemicals in the brain' is the factual but unimaginative answer, and I won't even waste time on the answers that popular media come up with - talk about lack of inspiration.

To bring forth my own definition would be too daring, but I do experience happiness now and then. More often then you think, actually. I'm a happy person. This happiness is more then the feeling of complete satisfaction and wellbeing that for instance a massage can induce, however great. It is unpredictable but I was aware of a moment of happiness the other day, I could catch it and I want to share it. Even though it will not make you happy, it may make you aware of your own happiness.


I was in the train. I had just devoured a huge hamburger and a milk&fruit drink, which had filled me with sugars, vitamins and fats - the body was content.
I was returning from Utrecht where I, presumably with success, had finished an exam, after which I had a drink with my classmates. The mind was challenged and the soul was satisfied.

I was listening to this music; rhythmic and a little unpredictable, without difficult lyrics to think about but still, in my ears, very exquisite.

first song

Then came the Moody Blues, where especially the last minute and a half are so gorgeous, with the violins and cello's.

second song

I was enjoying the view, consisting of the snowy landscape between Utrecht and Nijmegen, and realized how beautiful it was to me - even though at that moment it was nothing more then a hill with some bare bushes.





I thought - it's so great that I can listen to this music and look at this view. I'm so glad I've got all these things...

Then I was happy. The lovely small indescribable happiness, which makes all my earlier observations pointless. It was all those things together, perhaps, the complete satisfaction, the sensory pleasure, yet the most important thing was my gratitude for having ears and eyes to observe them.

I am not religious and my gratitude does not direct towards an invisible god nor the giving universe or something or someone else. It is directed towards the experience itself; I am exceptional in that I can experience this feeling. So many on earth will never have it - the music because they're deaf, the view because they're blind, the happiness because their lives will never lead them there.

so my gratitude focusses on the moment, I look until my eyes are dry and I listen until my ears fall off, I let the happiness overcome me. The experience gets stronger. I enjoy. It's stunning. I experience. I have now known happiness, not just in retrospect, the way that so much happiness reveals itself. No, in the present.

I looked out the window for another half an hour, my Macbook played different music, my view changed and Murphy's Law proves its worth in reversed proportionality - coincidence gave me hundreds and hundreds of geese, rising from the fields between Arnhem and Nijmegen.

Experience happiness. In the now. Yesterday you may have been happy, but this merely leeds to melancholy. This is the moment! This is your life! You've only got óne. Experience it.