Rooms with Pictures

   I have spent some time thinking about happiness lately,  My own, or the happiness of people I love and the people I used to love and the people who just want to be loved.  I wrote a little while back about happiness being as simple as living in the moment.  That it is about accepting where you are and what you are not and opening your arms to your life as it is.  I was onto something, but I think I got it a little wrong.  Accepting what is as what is might be contentment.  Not happiness.  Despite the two seeming to be interchangeable, I have come to understand them as very different creatures.  Contentment is a goal, to be certain.  And happiness, I think, maybe or maybe not, and maybe it's different for every wistful soul, happiness is a choice.  It is a thing you decide on.

    You sit down in a room with pictures of your life lining the walls and carpeting the floors.  Some of those pictures are sepia.  Some of them are too blurry, many too sharp, some with soft and rounded edges, some with harsh corners.  Some weigh more than others, whether that is fair or not.  Some of them deserve to be underfoot and some belong where the mirror should be and some are just transparent enought to let the sun come through. But you decide that.  You decide where each one stays, be it eye level or hidden behind the ceiling fan.  And that is happiness.  Designing your minutes- your rightthissecond- around what will be easiest to see.  Keeping the broken heart pictures in the room, but choosing for your own sanity to place them a little bit in the shade.

    It's not simple, this.  You can't save the damsel who loes her distress and we do like to be sad sometimes, don't we?  Brooding.  Wounded.  In need of a white knight that we will eventually send away for reasons we don't understand.  Because we haven't yet talked about how we have to save ourselves.  I am not totally sure why that happens.  Everyone is allowed some cloudy days, but I suppose it's up to you to growl at the rain or find some puddles to jump in.

   How obnoxious to make it sound so easy. But is there a chance that it actually kind of....is?  That true, actual, palpable happiness is up to you as much as the jeans you put on in the morning or whether you decide to thank the sun every time it rises and sets.