Our conversation about happiness took a wide turn into serendipity.
While sharing what makes us happiest I had an epiphany. All our scenarios were circumstantial, based on fortunate events and experiences that either happened around us, to us, or were otherwise created by us to experience and briefly enjoy. It occurred to me “that’s a lot of work for a fleeting bliss ultimately dependent on the next one.”
Being continuously happy requires effort and exposure to things outside ourselves while being content is a taskless state of peace within our circumstances whatever they are. Happiness is the ! at the end while contentment is the sentence before it we need not work to write, because we just let it fall into place. And we discovered that serendipity is both wondrous, beautiful, and exactly what our dinner conversation that evening had happily become.

Of all life experiences only one remains entirely unknown. Despite relentless attempts at its description from every conceivable perspective, unhinged fantasy, limitless speculation and sordid detail, unchallenged since the beginning of time, we still know nothing more definitive except for the promise that we never will for as long as we live.

Truth is, you get used to it.
It takes some time, but living single and alone eventually grows on you. You chew your food longer for lack of dinner conversation, sleep more soundly without a chatty someone stealing the covers, cuddling, or wanting something more. You save money on silly flowers or something special for no one special for no special reason, and you learn to be self-sufficient when sick, make your own soup and get your own toilet paper. You no longer worry about dying alone, just dying, and gradually forget the memory of a mind-blowing kiss, a hug or the unexpected touch of a caring hand. Truth is you get used to it and it grows on you like an annihilation of everything that might have been, drawing any willing heart, mind and soul closer to all the good things in your life that actually are.

A brush with depth.
I once knew a man who had a serious brush with depth. He failed to resurface, lost the only life he knew and was never the same again.

Each of us is given one or two moments in a lifetime to dramatically change course if we want it bad enough, have vision to recognize the opportunity and the courage to act upon it.

There are a lot of angry, fed up people in this world. Here at home and across global ponds, everyone wants change; half one way, half the other, half for economic reasons, half for moral reasons, half for certainty of rights, half to convict wrongdoings. And remarkably all profess a desire for unity, but only when that unification embraces their own cause at the expense of another’s.
Here in the calm of the morning, I consider the world landscape and how this ideal of “unity in diversity” unravels a little more each day and it’s more than a little eerie.
The ways of today’s world are far too complex for single issues which do more to divide than unite. No one person can do the job to achieve the one ideal all profess as their goal.
Our frustrated responses have become searches for simplicities where available, comforts where reliable and escapes where attainable, all within ever tighter communities which increasingly exclude views of others across the fence. Our solutions have become our problems, our chasms widen and our unity narrows as we fall into the bloody traps laid by the media and the powerful.
It’s now simpler to stage and post half-truth memes which underpin the basics of our convictions than to attempt to embrace complex truths of others. “Tell me how to think” has taken a front seat to thinking itself because too much pride is at risk for being wrong on some valid points made by the other side.
So we remain angry and fed up for all the wrong reasons and nothing changes, because nothing within any of us changes. Yet without us, nothing will ever change.

Stop buying unnecessary things. Toss half your stuff. Learn contentedness. Reduce by half again. Pick four essential things in life and stop the rest. Do them first each day. Clear distractions. Focus on the moment. Let go of attachment to doing and having more. Fall in love with less.

Maybe it’s because I’m getting older and wiser, but I’ve noticed that things which now bring me to tears are less the everyday instances of hurt, pain and sadness and more the unexpected moments of joy, reconciliation and serendipity. Maybe as years advance we become so accustomed to tragedy that we’re more easily moved to tears by sudden simple beauties which were always before us but came at an age when we believed the world owed us more. The less time I have left the more important I find it is to plan a clean exit on a high note.
This, and the wrinkles, is how I know for certain that I’ve grown up.

A few people in this world will change your life forever.
Find them.

Oh southwest wind
That blows all night
To clean our skies
And fly our kites.
You carry pollen
Delay our flights
Yet bring no rain
It’s just not right.
Make birdies fly
Into the walls
You spill our trash
And that’s not all.
My hair’s another
You don’t ignore
And make me look
Like one cheap whore.
A breeze is nicer
A gentler flow
But southwest wind
You just totally blow.