How to Tame the Wild Abandon

(July 8, 2006; musing and musing and musing)

I've been thinking about this for a while, and as I walked home from Yonge and Bloor at 3 AM, I think I finally got a handle on it, at least insofar as it applies to me.

To the unhappy person, happiness is a finite resource. It is spread thin over her life, fragile and easily destroyed, and so it must be hoarded and protected. She tucks it away for some future, needier occasion; however, hidden as it is from the sun, it oxidises into a useless mass. In trying to save it, she has wasted its opportunity.

The joyful person understands that happiness is created by happiness, and that there is no better way to guarantee that it will last than to bathe in it, fill every pore with it and let it have its way with her. Though prudence is certainly a good thing, banking on eventual glee and so severing the present potential for the same is ultimately self-destructive.

... but if I know this, why do I do so many stupid things?