Happiness is …

-1  bar falls 30.19  0mph  NW  windchill -1   Samhain

Full Moon of Long Nights     Day 8hr 46m

“Take anything and everything seriously except yourselves.” – Rudyard Kipling

As I get ready for two tours today, Kipling strikes a note I need to hear more often.  With all the news about happy people spreading the love out three degrees of separation I wondered about those of us who go through life somewhere in the muddle.  Yes, muddle.

Happiness comes to me only rarely, then for brief moments.  I’m not usually gloomy, but I’m not usually sunny either.  I come from a family with manic-depression, so a tendency toward the melancholy probably came with the helix.  Melancholy is an old friend, in fact, some of my best writing ideas and creative work comes when he pays a visit.

In fact, I distrust happy people to some extent.  It always seems to me that they willfully ignore a large part of what goes on the world.  Spoken, I know, like a guy who takes himself and his world too seriously.

I am one, I am many.  Whitman and I have our melancholy, but we also have our quiet joys, raucous moments, times of abandon.

Well, this is a bit of a downer, but I’m gonna leave it in anyhow.  How I felt this morning.