Happiness

Dear Baby,

I've stayed home for two days. If you have lots of free time, your thoughts start to wander. I seem to have lost interest in everything, food, shopping, my job, bigger house… Nothing seems to be appealing to me. Your Dad said it was just hormones. I don’t know about that, actually I often ask myself what I really want, but never have a real answer. Maybe that is why your Dad thinks the stars are lined up for me, but I just don’t know how to be thankful and still ask for more from my life.

I read a story long time ago. Once upon a time lived an unhappy king. Needless to say, he had everything, money and women, but he was still unhappy. So he promised to reward anybody who could make him happy. One day, this guy showed up, told the king he knew where the happiness was, but they had to walk across the desert to get it. The king said he was willing to do anything to be happy. The two of them started walking in the desert. After a while, the king wanted to pee. The guy told him not to pee the happiness away. So the king held it. As they continued to walk, the king got thirsty and started to drink water. He had to pee badly. The guy told him if he peed, there was no point to keep walking, because the happiness would be gone. So the king held it. This happened several times. Finally the king almost cried, he begged the guy to let him pee. The guy told him to go ahead. After he peed, the king sighed deeply with relieve: “This feels so great.” The guy bowed to him, said: “Congratulations, your highness, you found your happiness.”

Does that mean the real happiness is physiological? That’s probably not the point of the story. I guess the point is to appreciate what you have, a kind of cliché. Unfortunately the king’s happiness is short lived. Happiness is always short-lived. Say first you want love, once you have love you want money, once you have money you want power, once you have money and power, you probably want lust, once you have all that, you either want more money, more power, more women or you may start taking drugs or make it easy, jump off the Golden Gate Bridge.

So far in my life, I have never been near to having everything I want. Thank God for that so I have no desire to jump off the bridge or anything. However, I think I did taste the emptiness of that kind of life once.

In China, once you get into school, it’s very unlikely you will not graduate. There was no academic pressure whatsoever. So when I was in graduate school, I had an easy time in school. I had 3 close girlfriends who I was always with: DY, WC, DSC. We always went to class and leave at the same time. We went dancing, drinking, partying. After we got half-drunk, we would walk back to the dorm on the main road and laugh loudly and stupidly. I was the only one smoking. I would smoke in public which was very rare at the time. We would wear similar colorful jackets, riding bicycles down the street, yelling and laughing with each other. We had guys wait in line to buy us dinner. It’s hard to not pay attention to four young fearless, blatant, arrogant, intelligent yet silly girls. DSC was married, but her husband was working at a different city for a year. As for us three, we had guys who liked us, but we just pretended we didn’t know. We would go out with them but never really gave them the chance to go on a date. At the time, none of us tasted what it was like to love somebody but not being loved back. We enjoyed being the center of the attention.

One day, we were singing Karaoke at DSC’s apartment. It was so cold so I stayed under the blanket. Oh, by the way, four of us would often sleep in one bed because if we came back too late at night after the dorm closed, we had to go to DSC’s apartment. All three of them were singing and eating snacks. WC started to sing a folk sang “Walking on the road of the village”. I was smiling and eating with them, but all of a sudden, tears welled into my eyes. I was shocked myself. It’s still hard to describe what happened. It was like I was happy, I enjoyed that life but at the same time, I felt something was missing, I felt sadness and emptiness. I felt I was floating in the air. I couldn’t touch the ground. I was not holding onto something real. My life was like a dream. I remembered the laughter, but if I look back, there was nothing in it.

Soon after that, WC and DY both started dating seriously and eventually got married. I was attracted to someone too except I didn’t have a good ending. It was the first time I tasted the bitterness of love or infatuation or whatever. However, years later when we looked back at those times, we did agree that was one of the happiest times of our lives.

Dear Baby, when I was in high school, I really liked a Buddhism poem I read. It was about taking happiness, sorrow, life and death lightly, about having a peaceful heart and mind, and accept what fate bestows on you. It took me so many years to realize I am way too ordinary to be like that. I can’t really see life so wisely. I am still confused and have no clue what I want, but for now, I just want you to be healthy, to come to this world safely. That’s what happiness means to me right now.