I woke up this morning and decided to be happy.

It has been a little while since I’ve felt happy, and, although I’m not exactly sure why, I’ve been isolated, lonely, lost, and dazed. Not to mention confused. How does this sort of thing bode for an optimistic, extraverted type? Where is one to go, in such a state? I’ll tell you. The only place to go is up.

Reading Gustav’s piece about happiness, I began thinking. You know, I can decide to be happy, I thought. Simply decide. All the stuff isn’t going away. All the things happening in the world, the motivations of other people, the way people are sometimes - none of it will get any better by me stewing and moping around. I am not going to get anything accomplished by moaning and whining that things aren’t, shall we say, going exactly way I had wanted them to go.

So? Do they ever? Do things ever go exactly the way we want them to? There is always some sort of monkey-wrench thrown in, always something to make us stop and re-direct ourselves. And, is this necessarily so bad?

At times, when life throws something at me, I dodge it gracefully and then move in another direction. At other times, I let it hit me square on, and then am left feeling blind and groping through. As in this case, recently.

But what if I just decided to smile through it? After all, what is happiness, anyway? Can it be something I control? I guess it can be, at times. Not always, though. But instead of getting so wrapped up in my sad, low feelings, perhaps I can just sift through the bullshit and stick my face out into the sun. I know everyone gets sad. Life can get catastrophic, even. Life is full of tragedy. But also, of ecstasy. I must remember the ecstasy.

Lately, I’ve been working on my book, tapping away. Other times I’m staring at the screen, immobile, trying to stretch the boundaries beyond this seemingly endless state of stagnation, frozen by my own mind. Unable to relate, unable to even express what the devil is wrong with me.

Is it a symptom of writing processes, or is it something more? Am I being blind-sided by too many things in my life that need to be made right, or am I just floundering in the typical artist’s torture chamber of halting self-expression? Does one have anything to do with the other?

Does it matter?

The simple question remains – can I make myself happy? Can I decide to be so? Perhaps I can decide to quit this scene, this increasingly tiresome scene of self-analysis – who is Ophelia, really? What does she want? Where is she going? Why isn’t “it” happening for her? And, by the way, what is “it?”

Too much. It’s all too much. I need to give myself a small break from myself, and reach my arms up beyond the muck and touch the smooth blue of the sky and feel the soft fragrance of the wind and feel the silky arms of my children as they wrap around my neck in embrace and listen to the sharp crackling of the trees as the air grows cold and find the burst in my heart as it slowly breaks open from its hard shell and unclench my head as my thoughts take over in a whirling pattern of freedom and release. Certainly my head will cease its ache, and I might be able to sleep again. And also maybe to breathe again.

These are my terms of happiness. They are quite simple. Forget all I know. No expectations. Be myself, despite anything else that might develop from another. Remember myself in my family, in my humanity. Be honest. And, perhaps also, have no terms. Which means, really, all this would be just my happiness, period. It’s likely I’ll fail. Probable, even. But if I don’t try, I won’t begin.

And I suppose that’s what this is now. My beginning. Again.