Happiness is a lie.
And if you live chasing untrue, you spend your days batting at the wind, pulling for an idea that can’t deliver what you think you need.
Happiness will leave you longing for more in its coming and going.
Life unfolds messily mostly without us knowing quite how things will end up. At best, we can work hard to create the life we think we want. My schedule fills and my life tightens in my reaching for better, for more, but more often, I find myself worse off the harder I work for what I think I need - in the restless pursuit of happy moments.
You would think the more happy I gather together, the more satisfied and settled of a life I’d lead. But still, I’m empty in the in-between and hungry.
This manic going after of life is tiresome and besetting. In this way, happiness is an absolute lie.
If life is measured in how much happy moments we have together, our family is failing and we are taking on water faster than we can bucket it out. We live in stiff, isolating moments between laughter and lighter times when we’re all smiling and having a good time. When we do fall into happiness together, it’s euphoric and addicting, but it cuts when it’s done and we fall out of it disjointed again.
Happiness is a drug we’re all jonesing for.
But there is a better way.
Joy.
For me, joy is the result of love decided, rooted and held to in the swell of good and bad. It is remembrance that life is not about us, but about something so much better and bigger than ourselves, our dreams and desires and our expectations. Joy undoes happiness as ultimate authority on how our life measures up. Joy lifts us in the low and enlightens us all the more in the highs. It is no secret passage or mediative state to reach when you’ve learned to manage and re-architect disappointment with hold-your-breath positivity. No, joy is an acceptance that all of life is good and waiting to be lived. Joy is Heaven’s call now flooding through happiness to penetrate our feeble hearts and remind us that all shall be well, both now and in the life to come.