There are moments where you find happiness… Sometimes gazing out over the turquoise
water, or watching the sunset light up the sky in a magnificent display of
pinks, blues, oranges and gold with the ocean reflecting every stroke of this
masterpiece…
When you sit with your colleagues at beer o’ clock, making
private jokes that no one else understands, that are impossible to explain to
someone who hasn't spent 11 hours a day with you for the last few months…
When you find a piece of home in a life lonely as a vast
desert. A little piece of blue sky
sometimes struggling to be seen through a thick blanket of clouds, other times
it stretches as far as the eye can see, to the boarders of your world, and your
life, dazzlingly bright. You find
happiness in conversations with good friends who infuriates you and makes your
soul sigh with ecstasy, who tears your heart open and then helps you to wipe
away the tears you find spilling from the ragged edges. Who unashamedly and mercilessly mirrors your
faults and insecurities to you and forces you to stare them in the eye. Without
flinching or backing away. Without covering the imperfections with make-up or
shiny things. Forces you to stare at them long and hard. Until they blink and
slowly fade into long forgotten things.
Happiness is in the smile of a chubby-face baby catching a
ride down the beach in his mothers arms…
In rock music played much too loud while you walk home on a
cement road where the traffic is tourists calling out to each other in a cacophony
of different languages…
Happiness resides in surprise visits home. In the tender caresses
and the smiles beaming from faces streaked with joyful tears. It sits
comfortably on the couch doing ‘ordinary things’. Things that are sacred and
special in its ordinariness. It plays touchers and dress-up with a niece who
holds my heart firmly in her tiny toddler hands.
It is wrapped up in the cultures and beauty of the country
where I was born. The vast stretches of rolling valleys that give way to
immense mountain ranges. The warmth, friendliness and laughter that surround
you and welcome you back…
Happiness screams when you realize that you don’t need to be
dizzy with ecstatic, it-feels-like-my-heart-is-going-to-burst, my-cheeks-hurt-from-smiling,
life-can-not-get-any-more-amazing, happiness. It rumbles like a summer thunder
storm when you realize that sometimes it is OK to not be OK. That sometimes it is OK to simply just be full of fear and doubt and hurt and longing. To have to
gather all your courage and strength to get up, dress up, and show up… yes,
without make-up or shiny things.
No comments:
Post a Comment