happiness

i've been thinking about happiness a lot lately.  i think i'm generally a happy person.  if i had to place myself in a category of happiness, i think i fit best within the hedonist perspective.  i don't just constantly seek pleasures just for the sake of it.  i take life as it comes.  but it's not like if i saw an opportunity for me to be happy i would just sit idly by and see if it fell through.  i like being happy.  and for me everything i do and achieve in my life is for the end result of being happy in the future... maybe a day from now, a week from now, a month from now, or ten years from now.  

when people ask me, "what do you want to be when you're older," i always say happy.  i don't think it's a strange answer... it may not have been the answer they wanted to hear, they probably wanted me to say what i want to be professionally.  but even still, i want to be professionally happy.  if i hate my job, i'll be unhappy.  if i love my job, i'll be happy.  everything is correlated.  i need to be happy in order to do well with anything in my life - whether it's schoolwork, my job, my friendships and my relationship.  if i'm not happy, generally at least, everything in my life suffers... and i suffer. 

i don't really know what else 'smart sounding' to say.  

i guess i'll talk about something else. 

i think ken kesey is a brilliant man and he understand happiness... even if a large majority of his happiness was induced by acid.  

he says, "people think love is an emotion.  love is pure sense."  he's right.  love isn't just another emotion like happy or sad, love is inside your soul and it just is.  think about how depressing your life would be without love.  i wonder if there's people out there who don't have any love in their lives.  it doesn't have to be like, relationship love, but any love.  that would be awful.  but i imagine it happens.  

he has a lot of good quotes.  one of my favourites is, "sparks fly upward."  i don't even know why.  it just makes me think of being happy and sparks are like excitement, and i guess it's general consensus that good things go upward.  or maybe i'm making that up, but for me good things are always upwards thoughts.  i don't know. 

"nothing lasts."  that's true.  except rocks.  but even they erode.  but i think love lasts.  kesey said this when he found out he was basically dying.  he had complications from diabetes and from a surgery to remove a tumor.  people can't last but their words and ideas and thoughts can last.  

"loved.  you can't use it in the past tense.  death does not stop that love at all."  the truest thing.  you don't stop loving someone, or start loving them less because they're gone forever.  if anything, death would make love stronger because you have to use your mind and the love you have to remember that person.  love grows.  it doesn't die.  

i just started thinking about john lennon and how he got shot and died.  i used to think, geez that sucks, he could have made so much more music.  but then i think... what if he lived, and ended up being a sellout like everyone else.  maybe it's a good thing it happened so that what we remember is good things.  well besides yoko... but that's for another time and place.