Tuesday, February 5, 2008

Happiness is Two Kinds of Ice Cream...


It's funny, and a truism to say that different things can pop up in a person's mind becoming more or less personal or important depending on the thought you confront yourself with at any given moment. Thought is a continuum, a constant wave to be ridden. I guess I have an amusement park ride in mind. One that steadily vacillates back and forth on a squiggly, continuous flow. Not too fast, steady. Not too slow, but with a definite rythm to it. At least that's my vision now.

The things that become most important to you, who you are, and what you value can all come as a great surprise, can contradict what you "stood for" initially, if you're open to challenge, and if you're learning, or trying to learn and keep yourself stimulated. It can be important to step outside of the square box you're stuck in in your daily routine. Don't be afraid to take a different route, or to pick up something new, or to dig deeper into something that sparks your interest.

Of course, there are no perfect worlds. There is no paradise out there. There is no peaceable kingdom, which is what I'd hoped for, what I dreamt of, or deluded myself with all along, perfection. I guess supremity in anything would get boring after a while, after all, supreme beauty, supreme happiness. Happiness is defined by what it's not, which reminds me of the Wallace Steven's poem Sunday Morning:

Is there no change of death in paradise?
Does ripe fruit never fall? Or do the boughs
Hang always heavy in that perfect sky,
Unchanging, yet so like our perishing earth,
With rivers like our own that seek for seas
They never find, the same receding shores
That never touch with inarticulate pang?
Why set pear upon those river-banks
Or spice the shores with odors of the plum?
Alas, that they should wear our colors there,
The silken weavings of our afternoons,
And pick the strings of our insipid lutes!
Death is the mother of beauty, mystical,
Within whose burning bosom we devise
Our earthly mothers waiting, sleeplessly.

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