“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.”
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This week during the full moon, I was up at 3:00 am. Not because I couldn’t sleep, but because our dog, Fergie, was channeling her inner werewolf and felt the deep need to run the perimeter of our property, a Doberman guarding her castle.
Seeing her short, plump hound self run with ferociousness made my heart sing. That Fergie, with her mean little under bite, she is my hero. At that wee hour of the morning, I recognized something, it was small and warm inside me and it was happiness.
I wonder about happiness. I look around me and if people are indeed happy, they have not told their faces. I see stress. I see anger. I see dissatisfaction. But happiness ... not so much.
There was a time in my life that I was consistently unhappy. I was in an unhappy relationship, living somewhere that did not feel safe to my soul. I was working unbelievable hours making unbelievable amounts of money and had to force my frown upside down. But Boy Howdy, I did not mean that fake smile.
Looking back on that time now, I can see clearly that, much like Thomas Jefferson and those Constitution dudes penned, it was what I was pursuing that yielded the results. The pursuit of success and money is not quite the same as the pursuit of happiness.
I asked my daughters recently to describe their 2010 to me. In my opinion, it has been a year laced with good and bad, with struggles and victories, with joy and pain. In essence, it has been a year like all others. They both said, “Mom, it has been a happy year.”
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My cousin and his wife write a Christmas letter. I can translate their two pages in one paragraph ... “My wife, two children, and I have had a splendid year feeding the homeless and saving kids who have fallen down wells. With our trusty dog, Lassie, we have single handedly reduced the global warming effect and reversed the damage to the Ozone. We never tire of doing good for the planet and wish you all a Merry Christmas.”
My Christmas letter would read something like this ... “While sweeping off my sidewalk in July, a truck pulled up in front of my house. I thought it was the Publisher’s Clearing House Prize Patrol come to give me money, but alas, it was the Repo Man come for my former husband’s Motor Home.”
That is my life ... good, bad, incredibly funny, and never boring, sprinkled with bright and shiny moments of happiness.
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When I was growing up, my Mom had a tiny crystal Nativity scene. Somewhere in the putting away of the Christmas stuff, baby Jesus was lost from the manger. We searched for hours for that missing infant until my Mom in her simple, country wisdom decided that we would just pretend that this particular Nativity scene was before Jesus was born. “Besides,” she said, “Jesus is inside of us all the time anyway.” Later in life, I realized that she was saying, “Namaste,” aka “God within.”
I also came to understand that my Mom, with her limited resources and rather small view of the world, dreamed big. She made what we had seem not only enough, but somehow magical. I am forever grateful for what she taught me about life and about the choice of happiness.
So ... as we bustle about during the last few days of this year, as my cousin and his wife robe themselves in their super-hero capes, may we remember that within us lies our happiness. Within us lies the ability and heart to fill our manger. We just have to put aside all that binds us, recognize the warm feeling (even at 3:00 am) and let it shine.