Simple question in a morning’s e-mail: “Are you happy?” Why do I freeze up instantly, feel like I’m lying before I’ve written anything back? Or is it that I feel if I were happy in the way I’d like to be, the way we’d all like to be, I should be able to answer resoundingly Yes! as opposed to merely, after a pause, yes, that second yes coming out sounding more like “I suppose.” But “I suppose” also carries a tone of distractedness, a kind of “Gee, I’ve never asked myself that” surprise, which has to be counted a lie, because of course at some level everything has to do with finding or holding on to happiness, or what was once long ago formulated as happiness, though I sometimes wonder if that’s a word that can be used by anyone over a certain age—thirty, say. So, I throw out both the resounding and the suppositional, which leaves me what? It leaves me the cutting board and the qualifier knife, the thousand ways to slice the question up in the interests of honesty, but no way to make a meal of the results.

 

 

 

Photo: Loimere via Flickr