Woman walking on train rails
You are a true wizard now as you always wished. Does it make you happy?
Well, men don’t always know when they’re happy but…I think so
~ The Last Unicorn
There was a time that I didn’t think I would ever really know what happiness was. Not real happiness, the happiness that comes with being basically fully accepted by the world – or rather, figuring out that the world is never going to fully accept you, and that you have to stop caring whether or not it does. You have to be comfortable in your own skin.
The kind of happiness that lets you dance in the rain while you’re waiting for the train to arrive. It comes on you unexpectedly, like that long awaited tropical rainstorm after a drought. Suddenly there is light where there were shadows, and you realize that your life has hit balance; and you’re okay with that, and whatever changes the future may bring – because the future always brings changes – you’re pretty sure you’re going to be okay with that too; because you’re tired of living in fear that something is going to come along and take away what you’ve earned, tired of believing that you’re not worth contentment, tired of worrying that everything is too good to be true. Because for the first time in your life, the ever-shifting ground actually feels solid under your feet.
Happiness for me in the past has been a pie-crust promise, easily made easily broken, a fleeting temperamental thing that has too often proved impossible to catch and properly hold on to, but now…now I’m learning different.
Happiness isn’t the big things. It’s not the perfect job or the perfect partner or the perfect salary. Most people realize far too late that there is no such thing as perfection.
Happiness is the smallest things; it’s having someone that knows you well enough to know what to order you for supper after a long day, who knows how you take your coffee in the mornings and when you need it, it’s having a boss who trusts you enough to let you do your job without riding you, it’s making the time to flip through a few pages of a good book. It’s silly things like an extra toothbrush. It’s being able to look in the mirror and realize that ‘yes, this is my life, and it’s a really good life’. That is the fairy tale, that is the happy ending…even though in reality, there is nothing in life but beginnings.
I laid the train tracks to my own personal Vienna long before there was a train in sight that could make the trip; and I more often than not have stumbled my way along them rather than walked, I’ve felt the metaphorical iron callousing the soles of my feet; but I had a train to catch, so I kept walking; holding my arms out like a tightrope walker, or a child walking on the lip of the sidewalk…
And you know something? It was worth it…
Good things come in small packages, and sometimes we overlook the small ones for the forest of big, shiny, sparkly ones that catch our attention. Take the time to smell the lavender and relax, “Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.”