Complex Numbers

Happy Now?

Well, it's November now. Which means another round of 30DBC for me.

PROMPT November 1st

Write about something you want. Pick something that you don’t necessarily need, but would make you happy simply to have.

The first thing that comes to mind is a vaccine for... you know.

Not just for me, of course. I'm selfish, but I'm not that selfish. There are a lot of people suffering from this, both by having it and by having friends and family go through it, not to mention lost jobs and broken social networks. I'm fortunate for many reasons, but one of them is that no one I know in real life is sick... but then, I don't know too many people in real life anymore.

For myself, it might mean being able to travel again. I don't know if the foray I made to Alexandria last week was a good thing or not. I mean, I had a good time overall (except for that goddamned broken vending machine), but in a way, that just makes it worse. Winter is coming, as the saying goes, and with it an end to being able to sit on a patio and dine and drink beer in relative safety. More people congregating indoors, masked or not, means more chances for getting sick. I'm probably going to have to go back into hermit mode for a few months, which does not make me happy.

Whether travel in itself would make me "happy" or not is an open question, though.

I pretty much have everything I need and most of what I want (that flying car continues to elude me), and I'm self-aware enough to know that "stuff" doesn't make me happy; at best, it relieves the tedium of day-to-day existence. Hell, at this point, it might make me happier to dispose of a good bit of "stuff." Not to the point of going all minimalist or anything, but stuff does tend to accumulate.

But I don't think of happiness as a goal to strive for. I mean, sure, there's that line in the Declaration of Independence, that pesky "pursuit of happiness" thing, but I have other motivations. Besides, I'm pretty sure that the word had different connotations   250 years ago. I find that happiness is elusive in pursuit of it for its own sake; rather, it's a byproduct of other activities.

And I'm pretty simple, when it comes down to it. A good beer, some good music, a good book (all, of course, dependent upon my own subjective determination of "good") will do it. As will a few other things, like after I'm sick or in pain and suddenly I realize that I'm not; it's really my baseline physiological state, but feeling bad just emphasizes how good feeling ordinary is.

Hell, I don't even like the word. "Happy." It comes from the same Old English root as the word "happen." As in, I see it as something that happens to you, like winning the lottery (which might or might not make one happy). "Hap," apparently, did have the denotation of luck or fortune - both good and bad. The two French words I know for the equivalent concept are: content(e) and heureu(x/se) -- the latter of which also has connotations of good luck or fortune, and the former of which it's so far impossible for me to read without thinking of the equivalent word in English, which is not exactly a synonym for "happy," but connotes (to me, anyway) a more general, less exuberant feeling of wellness.

So I don't know if owning a flying car would actually make me happy or not, but I'm willing to take the chance.