Happy Seaweed

Happy:  Favored by luck or fortune; enjoying or characterized by well-being or contentment.

Happiness shouldn't require effort on my part, and it should come as a kind of peace.  All I have to do is sit back and let it wash over me.  Life gives me what I need if I'm wise enough to see that.  Old Guy.

Happiness is not something to go out and seize.  Happiness is taking satisfaction in what is available right now, not hitching it to the future.  Too often my definition of happiness looks forward.   The future is tricky - the future might not come.  Someone who is probably old.

I don't understand happiness only as someone just always smiling and laughing.  It's more like inner happiness, where you feel you have done everything right in your life, you haven't made anybody unhappy.  You have a certain kind of peace and balance in yourself, and you are not anxious abut what will happen the next minute or the next day.  You let it go and you don't worry and you lead a balanced life.  If you want the next moment where everything will be better, then you'd better do this moment right.  Old person.

Am I happy?  Of course I am.  Yet sometimes I think I enjoy being unhappy because I put so much effort into finding things that assault my serenity.  Yet . . .  I am drawing a lot of happiness from small things that ordinarily would be quite irritating.  For instance I was unhappy when my gym closed, depriving me of the opportunity to burn off some of my unhappiness through strenuous cardiac arrest . . . er, exercise.  But a few days ago the directive came down from On High that outdoor pools in closed complexes may open while large indoor commercial pools may not.  OK - my community has a pool - a pool that I normally sniff at because it's only 2/3rds the length of a normal-sized gym pool.  Still, better than nothing, right?  I swam there for the first time today and it was pretty irritating . . . I mean, great and funny.  I'm tall so it was like . . . stroke . . . stroke . . . stroke . . . run into the wall.  Stroke . . .  stroke . . . stroke . . . hit the wall with my head.  To get my normal swim completed I need to do like 2,897 laps even though I only swim like 100 yards during a normal workout.  But this is an outdoor pool and it's pretty great to be able to swim outdoors but I'm approximately the palest human being this side of the Arctic Circle so I got sunburned.  This harshed my buzz, to coin a phrase, washing away any joy I got from not being irritated.

Irritating, right?