The art of Happiness

I haven’t been writing--I have been ambivalent about most things, haven’t had a stand to make about anything, couldn’t find the time to read, couldn’t remember how to string coherent thoughts together, couldn’t decide on how to represent myself. When I read what I’ve written, it occurs to me that there is a disjuncture between this self that writes and the self that is being projected to the world, like a key that doesn’t fit into the keyhole. I guess that happens because reflexivity often springs fourth from more negative than positive situations. So the self that is transcribed onto paper is often more contemplative and distressed than the public self.

“We all need someone to look at us. We can be divided into four categories according to the kind of look we wish to live under.
The first category longs for the look of an infinite number of anonymous eyes, in other words, for the look of the public...The second category is made up of people who have a vital need to be looked at by many known eyes...Then there is the third category, the category of who need to be constantly before the eyes of the person they love...And finally there is the fourth category, the rarest, the category of people who live in the imaginary eyes of those who are not present."
The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera.

When I read that, I thought of Geertz’s “man as a symbolizing animal”, just as how I wrote the lines above to assure the world and myself that I am not strange/a weirdo/alienated from people.

Am I generalizing when I say that life is always a tension of sorts, that’s how it appears to me. It is not an issue of the grass being greener on the other side though, it is a matter of limits and extremes. I can never be wholly happy; I realized that in a moment today, I think I can never be. I was in the cinema this evening, watching a show, laughing and enjoying myself. During that one single transitory moment when I reached an extreme point of elation, a wave of fear washed over me. The day flashed by: dazzling lights, Christmas crowd, December cool wind air, shopping centres’ smell, and I am made to feel a strange sense of fear for being so happy. Then it struck me that this feeling is familiar, I am not new to it, and in the darkness of the cinema, I realized that these same emotions are replicated on airplane flights back home. When I am watching one of those in-flight screenings, the whole vacation plays out in my mind in seconds. And I feel that I am on cloud nine literally and figuratively, but that is immediately replaced by a combination of unfounded fear and insecurity.

I’ve always felt this way, but only today am I aware that I’ve always felt this way. I realized this fear is a response to transitory happiness, a fear of losing it when all is over, when the plane lands, when the show’s over, when the curtains are drawn and the actors do a curtsey.