A post about finding happiness, I think

For a long time, happiness was in the future. Flashes of joy waited around corners, coming from different quarters: after work some days, training at practice some days, at home some days. Moments, here and there, wherein I could forget that my mind was a toxic stew of conflicting emotions and information of no import, and I could see the world in front of me. But if you did a spot-check of my emotions at any given moment, the odds weren’t with you that I’d be happy.

What was it? I was a teenager, for a start. Teenagers don’t get many reasons to be happy. We’re treated like children and expected to act like adults. Our minds are fritzing blenders, throwing out unrefined sparks of genius and idiocy with the volatility you’d expect from anything undergoing massive metamorphosis. We’re ridiculed for the most natural things—naivete, self-expression, any shreds of optimism we retain—loudly and repeatedly, to our faces, by people who hate themselves for getting old. And, most terrifying of all, our own minds and bodies are not under our control, instead held in sway by the hormone monsters, shame wizards, and social-anxiety banshees that live in locker rooms, subsisting on foot fungus and self-loathing. We took our happiness where we could find it, on sports pitches and on the internet, on dates with people we’d never follow up with and in books. Happiness was always a transient thing, never running continuously for more than a week, tops. Teenagers aren’t content.

Or perhaps it was my own special brand of mental spiraling that made me unhappy: the internal monologues about nothing that mattered, the unstoppable muttering through of song lyrics I didn’t even like, the fretting about which leg to start going up stairs with, the hours spent on social media because white noise was better than the alternative and books weren’t cutting it anymore. It started when I was twelve or thirteen, this mental fog that made being present in my life a memory.

I started trying to fight it a few years ago. I'm fortunate enough to live in the most beautiful state in the Union; I took more of my workouts outside, took the dog on walks, worked on the trails at a ski area. There weren't any walls, you see. There's a thing I used to do: I'd take in the gorgeous spread of nature before me, and I would imagine that my conscious wasn't inside me, but in the woods, that the center of my mind and soul wasn't balancing above my body, but spread across the trees and rocks and sunlight, receiving all, free of mundane interference. It worked, for a second or two.

The trip to Skye was supposed to be a transformational event. I was to hole up on a remote, beautiful island and cut past all the shellacked layers of confusion and misplaced self-defense. I would find the bedrock of my true self, and I would be content. I had hoped that by removing myself from the fully-formed life that Past-Me had built (because as someone said on the internet, “you in the past” is just you but dumber), I’d have the freedom to rediscover the joy that had eluded me since the first time I wanted the solace of my own room and loud music. 

But whatever the reason, his heart or his shoes, the Grinch stood on the Isle of Skye, wondering why his life hadn’t changed. It turned out all I had done was get a bigger room with louder music; the wolf still waited at the door, and of course it wasn’t my family, friends, town, and life; it was the mental tics that had made them so intolerable in my eyes.

Yesterday I sat down to write a big essay about all this, about how it was time for me to accept that I wouldn’t change, that it was time to accept a life where I was just me, warts and all, and that any further efforts at auto-reinvention would only distract even more from the world in front of me. It was very clever, and the last nail in the coffin of my childhood dreams. Or so I thought.

I saved the draft, closed my computer, put on some shoes, and went out for a walk. It was a beautiful afternoon, the sun waking up the first scent of spring on the ground, the air the very nectar of the gods. Chocolate ice cream glimmered on my tongue, and shy Scotch cats crossed the streets in front of me. I wonder...

The undercurrent of mindless thought was there, murmuring along about David Bowie minutiae or some such. On any walk in the last five years, I would’ve let it get stuck, get caught in a mental holding pattern, and the walk would just be something that happened while my mind turned inwards, oblivious.

But yesterday, I gave it the slightest of nudges...

...and I was free.

There were the mountains.

Here was the music.

Nothing in between.

I don't know how it happened, but I’ve gotten what I’m looking for.