On Happiness

I think happiness is not a release or a surrender, and I don't think it's something that happens without a great deal of effort. Too many people just cover up their dark parts, their wounds, with masks and distractions and fleeting accomplishments and forced positive thinking and call that happiness. But happiness is a battle. It means staring down the scary things and fighting, fighting, fighting. And then, in the end, embracing. It is the hero's journey of the human heart, and it begins with the seizing of the sword. Once the battle is over and the dust has cleared, there is space for happiness to exist. True happiness will not dwell in a chaotic heart. This is because it's only after clearing out the painful things, after earning our battle stripes, that we realize that happiness was always there, like oxygen like grass like blinking. And once we have that perspective, once we feel the deep and clear silence of happiness ringing throughout our own chaos-free caverns, then the battle to keep it begins.