Item: 1 bag of Brach's candy corn
I've been craving candy corn for awhile, and finally gave in and bought it this morning, since it wasn't showing up anyplace on its own. Fall seems to bring on this craving. I don't need a lot of candy corn, just a little bit. By a little bit, I mean not a whole bag - I've already gotten a satisfactory amount of sugar and corn syrup today, so will have to find something to do with the rest besides keep eating it.
I was noticing something unusual about myself on vacation last week, something sort of flat. It wasn't that I wasn't enjoying my time there, because I was, but I wasn't enjoying it dramatically more than I enjoy my regular life. I can think of vacations when I was bouncing off the walls within the first minutes of getting away from my regular life, experiencing a tremendous release, and I didn't really have that this time. I felt calmed, and content, but not with that sense of deep relief and returning to health.
Could this be, I wondered, because I'm happy with my regular life? This was an unexpected thought, but then happiness is often unexpected. I've got problems, but they're not, at the moment, the kind that are driving me to the edge of desperation. They're problems I can live with. It seems like such an incongruous thing, that I could have actually succeeded in arranging my life in such a way that it suits me, regardless of whether it makes sense to anyone else.
Proclaiming that I've arrived at happiness, though, seems to me like a dicey thing to do. Happiness is a delicate formula of components that continually shift and rebalance. Not only can you not control the formula, I'm not sure you can even identify what all the components are. Plus, it has a way of appearing with different faces: it's possible to think I'm happy when I'm not, or to be happy for the wrong reasons. I tried to write something about happiness once, and it was hard to do, but I was happy (haha) with how it turned out. It stumbled around but it did, I felt, finally capture something of the nature of happiness. This piece of writing was on a disk which subsequently became corrupted with a virus and the contents lost, which I guess is fitting, because this is what happiness does. It appears; it disappears; it reappears. Don't even try to keep up.
I was noticing something unusual about myself on vacation last week, something sort of flat. It wasn't that I wasn't enjoying my time there, because I was, but I wasn't enjoying it dramatically more than I enjoy my regular life. I can think of vacations when I was bouncing off the walls within the first minutes of getting away from my regular life, experiencing a tremendous release, and I didn't really have that this time. I felt calmed, and content, but not with that sense of deep relief and returning to health.
Could this be, I wondered, because I'm happy with my regular life? This was an unexpected thought, but then happiness is often unexpected. I've got problems, but they're not, at the moment, the kind that are driving me to the edge of desperation. They're problems I can live with. It seems like such an incongruous thing, that I could have actually succeeded in arranging my life in such a way that it suits me, regardless of whether it makes sense to anyone else.
Proclaiming that I've arrived at happiness, though, seems to me like a dicey thing to do. Happiness is a delicate formula of components that continually shift and rebalance. Not only can you not control the formula, I'm not sure you can even identify what all the components are. Plus, it has a way of appearing with different faces: it's possible to think I'm happy when I'm not, or to be happy for the wrong reasons. I tried to write something about happiness once, and it was hard to do, but I was happy (haha) with how it turned out. It stumbled around but it did, I felt, finally capture something of the nature of happiness. This piece of writing was on a disk which subsequently became corrupted with a virus and the contents lost, which I guess is fitting, because this is what happiness does. It appears; it disappears; it reappears. Don't even try to keep up.
posted by Karen at 10:44 PM
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