I saw Happy Today

A simple Buddhist tenet struck me with such intensity that I feel a thousand kegs of beer have been lifted off my aching back.

"The pursuit of happiness is in itself the greatest cause of sorrow," so the teaching goes. Indeed, this is what I have been doing with a constant consciousness.

Happiness, happiness, happiness!

How can I be happy today?
Who can make me happy today?
What will make me happy today...

Let me burst with happy!

Such legitimate questions I attempt to answer with mapped out bullet points of "things to do" and "ways to achieve" what I want. All for the sake of being happy.

You'd think by now time, age, experience, all the preachings, prayers, study and self admonitions to always be grateful and count my blessings would render me an expert in identifying worm holes to a bogus kind of happy. But, no. It didn't even occur to me that I was consciously seeking the "feeling" of being happy and in doing so was creating the exact reverse of what I so vainly sought.

I fastidiously claim to be a person unaffected by the need to acquire and possess material things. True. True. I can live with the basics. I can curve my wants and lust for things. Yet...yet I had this one covetous yearning for something I discovered was the cause of all my self inflicted woes.

So I went out today to sit alone, and sip alone, and eat tuna pan de sal alone, and to write alone and watch three birdies nimble crumbs off a plate. Yes, I went out still carrying the same dark and heavy invisible load I had been traveling with for weeks on end now. Perhaps, I need a pill for this to lift, I pitifully thought while sipping the last of my cafe mocha.

And since I had time to kill I went dragging my heavy package of gloom inside the quiet bookstore. I proceeded to the back section where, without as much as a thought, I pulled out a thick study of Kabbalah, as well as one of Buddhism. I plopped myself into the nearby chair.

And that was when I read about happiness.

And without as much a a plink, it lifted. It being the oppressive power that was tied to my being for so long now it has aged me a span of two centuries and a day plus two minutes.

Ah' yes, the answer.

My happiness was tied in pursuing the agreements of people, in eliciting the attention, the outward manifestations of affection, and the affirmations of those who matter most to me. I seek this in my own terms, my own style, my own way...an addictive craving for seeing me...for validating me.

Sometimes, we can be so blind to our own selves without meaning to be. With all honesty, I never knew I was like this...this woman blindly pursuing happiness dressed in jeans and shirts and skirts and smiles and words...Could this be why I find so much satisfaction inside a classroom..with eyes all centered on me?

But the veil has been lifted, the load rolled out.

Happiness can't be found in expecting other people's affection. If nothing more, this has left me depleted and wasted and hallow.

Happiness is nothing less than a by product. A by product of right decisions, of right relationships, of right thinking.....all together of a life lived well.