Feelin’ All Right…Happiness

Traveling around in the sixties, I got lots of perspectives on what people thought happiness was. Well, for everyone but me. I was sometimes moving so fast it was a blur, a sort of Doppler shift of experiences and locations. Zoom…I was outta there! Of course, a lot of my rationale for moving around was that I was looking for happiness, too.

But there was an experiential advantage in that I got to see what other people’s experiences, expectations, and realities were. A lot of the time, I was just clear that theirs was certainly not for me. There was a certain young lady whose job at the factory was the center of her existence; when she wasn’t gossiping about the people she worked with. The fellow who barely made a living but obsessively collected miniature bottles of booze for consumption on the weekends. The druggies whose entire lives were tied to the next score. And a friend who was a serial lothario. By contrast, some of those made the family I knew composed of petty thieves almost normal.

Many, admittedly not all, of these didn’t think of themselves as deviant, weird, or abnormal. And they were happy. Lots of them felt that I was the weird one, traveling around with no fixed abode, never staying at one job long, no education, and having a guitar as a constant companion. All right they did have a point.

Among the things I learned was that happiness was not a single point to which all people were tethered. It also wasn’t necessarily healthy or socially acceptable. It’s a shifting target in life, and it may not be wise to think about it as rock solid and forever.

But if you have it, savor it.