NB

Dear Mind Over Matter,

Don't you just love it when you get somewhere you didn't even know you were going?  Like when I find myself staring at the wall in my usual way, and noticing how supremely happy I am. 

This sensation occurs when I am not directly the focus of a conversation, but listening to others, or with others, but not really doing anything.  Just setting, I guess. 

Either I have changed my notion of what it feels like to be happy, or, somehow, the state has become more accessible to me.   What I especially love about this sensation, is that it comes out of nowhere. 

I suspect my previous construct of happiness required a large effort of planning and imagining being happy, waiting for the Big Day of the upcoming Happy Event, and then sort of wondering if this was all there was.

What I am talking about here, is different than that- I don't think it can be hunted, or seeded that way.  You can't stock it like a pond, with happiness fish to catch later.  I think you have to do something else to get this feeling- wander into a detached assessment, or a back burner meditative state.  You can't look directly at it; it will scare off.

Georgia O'keeffe said that happiness was silly, because it was so fleeting, so maybe this thing I am referring to isn't even properly happiness- it might be called frisson.  Or being.  Or self awareness.

It hardly matters, really, because rhetorical pondering of happiness might be just as silly as pursuing it; what you can do, without fear of silliness, is watch Georgia O'Keeffe in this little film, and hear it from her, and decide what you think about it.