Fluid Emotion

Imagine a big bowl of liquid happiness. You can't simply use your hand and scoop it out as you please, but instead you must use two fingers and pinch together as much as you can before it evaporates. Slowly I'm coming to the realization that happiness and fulfillment are extremely temporary and fleeting. You don't simply find it; you must constantly work to hold onto it. You often see in the movies someone who becomes happy and blurts out something along the lines of, "I'm so happy, I could die right now". This might lead you to believe that once you achieve it, you won't ever lose it. This might be why I have trouble with Buddhism and the "enlightenment" process. Like most of my posts, I have done no research prior to writing them. I am under the assumption that once you become enlightened, you are indefinitely fulfilled. It all seems like a final destination, and of course I have huge issues with anything that's considered to be final.

A friend was once described to me as never being happy. This didn't strike me as being odd, because, well, who is every really happy? I suppose maybe this person has higher standards than most people, and so it is that much harder for them to find whatever it is they want. The point I want to get across though is that happiness isn't constant and only occurs in short bursts. So in a sense, we are all essentially wistful by nature. While it is possible to come to a point in your life where happiness occurs more often, it's virtually impossible for it to be constant.

When thinking about the millions of connections that are made in the brain every second, it's hard to believe all of them would contain thoughts of happiness. Longing for example is something most experience every single day. It's quite unavoidable and is just one instance that detracts from our happiness. We all yearn for something, and have incessant needs that do not dissipate over time. We all changed psychologically over time as well and those needs change.

Much like plucking a fly out of the air with a pair of tweezers, we have to learn how to obtain what we want and maintain a strict effort to make it last. I might sound like I'm contradicting my earlier post about free will and determinism if I say it's completely up to us and our efforts to obtain happiness, so I will say this: Human are whimsical beings. We may never understand what exactly makes us happy, but we have a general idea. While our happiness may be entirely deterministic, if you throw enough darts, sooner or later, you'll hit the center. Eventually, while you may never get the exact muscle memory to do it every time, you can learn to hit it much more often. We make whimsical changes to our lives out of pure curiosity and we learn to harness these changes so that have a higher chances of hitting the bulls-eye. Avoiding any conflictions with my strong devotion to determinism, all of these are indirect changes. Not entirely a shot in the dark, much like quantum mechanics, but an educated guess.