I smile uncontrollably and cannot stop myself from slowly closing my eyes and trying to breath it in. My senses are so surrounded that I can only think this moment is contained within the air around me, and the deeper the breath I take, the longer I can hold on to it for. This is not caused by a single event or place. I cannot trace the origin and I have no way of knowing when or how it will be snatched away again. That is why it must be in the air. So transient and fleeting.
I do all I can to block out the fear of it leaving. To worry and anticipate its departure only seems to hasten its demise. But how can I not? A feeling of such encompassing entirety. Not elevation from banality but exquisite immersion within it; so deeply that everything appears at once familiar and foreign.
The haggard, inconstant splashes of beauty, and then the wretched squalor and miserable humanity.
What I am trying to describe is, I think, happiness. Not the feeling of being happy. But the state or presence of happiness. Still, sometimes, I fail to recognise it and spend time trying to decipher what that fluttering, unsettling tension is inside me. I assume there is something to resolve or understand; something that requires work.
And then there will be a shard. Not of light, or revelation. Nothing so ethereal. But a shard of happiness so sharp, so precise, that it will be unmistakable. And that is when my smile becomes uncontrollable.
Absorption and assimilation
This week I saw 'The Great Beauty' (or La Grande Bellezza). [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=shyf_4oUQR4&w=560&h=315]
I found it to be stunning. It encapsulated so painfully what sudden and uncontrollable moments make all the rest so very much worth the effort. And that in fact without the squalor, the dull and the repetitive there would be no contrast; no flashes; no shards.
And even when they come, they are not without pain, or longing, perhaps even tears. That is why I said happiness rather than being happy. The state of happiness includes the acceptance of being sad, laughing, loving. To me, it is an alignment, just for a moment, of everything within your life such that it reveals, what I now have the words to describe as, a great beauty.