A jar full of candies. Wishes half-boiled on medium heat. Hearts exchanged at parallel positions during midnight. A lottery won on a fluke. Answers to the lost questions in the desert. Winds blowing in the desired direction. Seasons arranging in the coveted order. Miseries falling like dominoes. Views shifting as per the desires. Life happening as per the expectations.
Out of all the things in the world, what is happiness for us?
Last year ended with making Elon Musk the wealthiest human being to have ever existed, to have ever lived on this planet. Will he be remembered eternally for this legacy? Will he be the face people send forth to represent humankind? Will he be the most known person of this generation, perhaps a thousand years from now? Does this in itself become the perennial source of happiness for him? If so, is this the route to comfort, to peace, to joy in life? Then how are we supposed to navigate our lives with a non-existing net worth?
In a society, a culture that does not associate joy with any of the aforementioned, how are we supposed to live here, right here?
This is a place mired in the weight of customs it once self-created. A place where we kill out of sheer doubt. We kill humans, we kill men, we kill women, we kill children. We do not even spare the animals or the non-living. The most obedient here are those who ask permission before drawing a breath, before releasing it. This obedience is instilled early, the moment a child is born, it is fed into him through the rigid machinery of the system, and by the time he steps out of it, he is no longer a human being of blood and muscle and organ. He is an empty steel shell, gleaming from head to toe, hollowed out inside, filled with hierarchies and customs and ideologies that should never have existed, yet are now enforced in this society, preached into every heart, and practiced by every hand.
The children wandering on the streets. The woman folded into some corner, counting the atoms in all four walls, each atom hiding an abyss inside it. Sometimes, staring too long into that abyss, they go mad. There are such souls, circling endlessly, like a stone tied to a string, spinning around its center, waiting for the string to snap, to finally be flung free. Like a deer roped to a tree, going around and around in search of an opening, only to come full circle and begin again.
In a place where confinement outnumbers freedom, where compliance drowns individuality, where there is more crowd than there are people, what is the worth of happiness? What is the shape of ecstasy?
A corner where the fence has fallen. A crack in the wall. A hole just wide enough to breathe through. A window, just one window in the house, a roof, under which, you can stand upright without having to bow. A threshold where you need not shrink to exist, need not hide to be yourself. Just enough room to push your head out and feel the air move through your hair.
That, that bare, irreducible minimum, is happiness for us.
