Happiness is...

I've just realised – This will be the last post before my birthday. The next time I post anything on my blog, I'll be officially a year older. I was organizing my desk in my classroom earlier today (okay, so I was actually rummaging through it trying to find something I had misplaced), and I found a couple of journal entries I wrote during my first week as a new teacher here in Inuvik. That was three years ago. I used to assign a journal topic, and then as the students wrote their entries, I would write at my desk on the same topic. One of those entries was about happiness. I was so much more poetic then; perhaps it's because I was a brand new teacher, young and visionary. Now, although I'm not old by any means, I've somehow lost that imagination and vision. I'm going to try my hand on the same journal topic: happiness.

Happiness is in days that slip by uneventfully. It is the moment between day and night, ever-elusive, but whose presence cannot be denied. (I've often thought of sitting outside on the deck and trying to definitively distinguish the moment when day turned into night. Perhaps if I sit there and mutter “day, day, day, day... night,” I would finally be able to grasp that magical, minuscule moment.) Happiness is having no questions, or questioning but being perfectly okay that there are no answers. Happiness is not feeling the demands of the world, of myself. It is in the fingers that somehow find their way on the keys of a piano and can express what the heart feels.

(I've just spent the last hour and a half having a nice chat with my friend, who is currently staying with me. Happiness resides there too, in the comfortable air that hung between us, in the intensity of listening and communicating.)

Or, perhaps it really is as easy as what Charlie Brown says: Happiness is two kinds of ice-cream, five different crayons, learning to tie your shoe for the very first time....