Happy Enough

I hadn’t had a shower in days.  A real one, anyway.  When you’ve got water for only half an hour out of twenty-four, priorities change.  I think I’d had one two days back, just to wash off salt and sand, lined up in my bathing suit next to ten or fifteen others.  We stood squirming and squealing, brushing soap from our eyes and trying to dodge the older women pushing every available bucket under our spitting streams of water. Cooking, cleaning, and laundry were impossible with empty buckets.

I sat outside, the air hot and dark except for a smattering of far-off twinkles where Heaven had begun lighting candles.  Strains of an accordion and children’s voices singing in Albanian broke through the hovering humidity a few yards behind me, and I was thankful for the coolness of concrete under my legs.  We didn’t have electricity either.  Three (maybe four) orphans had draped themselves over my arms and lap, sleeping and sighing.  Perhaps dreaming.  One of them was drooling down my leg.  That moment – the nasal soothing of accordion against a crashing hidden tide, the star-littered sky and fatherless children settled in my arms – is crystallized in my memory.  I can’t forget because in it, only one thought soaked my tired mind: I couldn’t be happier.    

Funny the things that make us happy.  They’re often not what we think.  If someone had told me that being hot, dirty, and drooled on would bring unexpected bliss, I would have said they were crazy.  But I was there on the July beaches of Albania and I know it, satisfaction rose up in my soul like the ocean on the shore, warm and whipped to foam.  It ebbs up even now, miles and years later in moments I wouldn’t suspect. 

This week many of us mourned the extinction of a great light.  The voice of Whitney Houston will never be heard live again. Other shocking lights have also flickered and faded to black over the recent past – Michael Jackson, Amy Winehouse.  Fan or foe, no one can argue that they possessed many of the qualities we who are less than famous want to believe will make us happy: talent, acclaim, success, wealth, beauty, world-wide recognition and approval.   

Sadly, the very “blessings” they received often twist into curses.  Ask any celebrity hounded by paparazzi and opportunists where they find peace or if loneliness floats just under the surface of their relationships.  We who devour the details of their lives do so because it appears that they have arrived – every happiness-inducing brass ring lies within their grasp.  We look at all they have (all we are confident would satisfy us if it were ours), and expect them to be happy.  The Third World looks at us and expects the same.

But, are we?  Satisfied?  Happy?  Where do we find peace? Does loneliness float just beneath the surface of our relationships, too?  

In reality, many of us struggle because we, and the brass rings we endlessly chase, cannot live up to our own expectations.  Success has a mighty reputation, but usually takes more than he dishes out.  Beauty is a fickle lover – the longer we hold her close, the more she slips from our embrace.  Talent won’t do much without effort, determination, and sacrifice tagging along, and, wealth?  Ironically, he satisfies most when we pass him off to others, the aura left in his wake warmer than cold hard cash in our hands.   

Again I return to my question at the root of this written pursuit – why?  Why does mankind continue to chase after goods that case study after case study reveal are not as satisfying as we hoped they would be?  Why do hollowed corners hide in the pockets of our souls?  Why do we crave significance, purpose, and hope unchanging, yet seek them in values that make promises which are transient at best and heart-breaking at worst?  Success, beauty, talent and wealth are satisfying to an extent, but they leave bare places we weren’t prepared to expose.  They aren’t bad, they just aren’t enough.

So, what is enough?  If Whitney, Michael, and Amy had everything and yet possessed nothing, what is it I should press on to possess instead?  If what I think will make me happy in reality doesn’t finish the job, what, then, is sufficient?  What fits into the hollow pockets of my soul? 

I have to wonder if it’s even possible for us to spend our lives searching for something that cannot be found.  Why do we search to be satisfied at all?  Can we hunger for a food that does not exist?  Can we thirst for water that will not flow?  Would we be drawn to withering oasis after oasis if true Paradise didn’t somewhere bloom and breathe?

I have seen fleeting reflections of Paradise from the corners of my eyes, so I know it is there.  Its reflections glance off Heaven’s candlelight and dance to an accordion serenade, they sigh softly in my arms and dribble down my leg.  They whisper of a wealth that is richer, a talent purer, a success greater and a beauty more enduring than my heart dares to hope.  We chase after shadows mostly because, whether we realize it or not, they remind us there is light.  When the brass rings blocking my vision are pushed aside and I stand in that Light, shadows stripped and Paradise rising up like the ocean on the shore, only one thought crystallizes and remains: I couldn’t be happier.