a new varietal of potential happiness
a short essay on yearning and contentment
Thesis: Although this may be a strange thing to say, in cycling between states of melancholia, wistfulness, and yearning for unattainable experiences, I have found an overall good way for all of us now to be happy.
When I’m happy, I like to put a lot of sadness into it. Not to take away from the happiness, but to let me savor it more by putting some salt in it. When I’m sad, I garnish the sadness by sprinkling it with the parsley of happiness. But, in plating the sadness so delicately, I am brought to something which is itself a kind of happiness: sad-happiness!
I am so excited to tell you about this incredible new thing I’ve found: sad-happiness!!!
If this sounds sad to you, that’s because it belongs to the family of bittersweet states. But don’t forget that sad-happiness is also a long-studied and full-fledged version of happiness. It is too difficult to maintain the other kinds for very long, any more than it’s possible to prepare Michelin-star meals at home every day.
Sad-happiness is the high-quality spicy Korean ramen in your kitchen drawer. Sad-happiness is bibimbap made with leftovers from last night. Sad-happiness is a fairly good small tomato. Sad-happiness is just ordinary. It reminds you of home although it is not the best.
Sad-happiness is not being the best. Sad-happiness is not even being second best. Sad-happiness is just being happy to be here, i.e., not being dead. Sad-happiness is having happy memories of someone who now makes you sad. It is a rushed hug at the airport. An apology that comes too soon or too late. Wondering when you will experience sad-happiness together again.
Sad-happiness is having almost no pimples, but still having pimples. Sad-happiness is getting a second dog after your first dog died. Sad-happiness is wondering whether you could love a third dog, even. At some point in the future. Maybe not, but maybe you could.
Sad-happiness is single living, and also, all of the alternatives. Sad-happiness is loving people you can’t understand (ex-friends, ex-lovers, current friends, current lover). Sad-happiness is watching the terrible news with friends. Sad-happiness is, often, things on the internet. Sad-happiness is the kind of happiness that comes after failure. Sad-happiness is the kind of happiness that comes after loss.
By attempting to separate out happiness and sadness, labeling happiness as “good” and sadness as “bad,” our culture pushes us to succeed without knowing loss, since success is sold to us as pure happiness. I no longer want to triumph. I want to live inside a structure of feeling that allows for non-linear emotional experience, for returning to the sad things of the past again and again. If I chose otherwise, I would choose a loss of my history, since much of what has happened to me has been sad.
Having come this far, it is not possible or necessary for me to mask my sadness with apparent happiness. Nor does it lessen my present happiness to face this ordinary sadness. The Buddha said that our basic happiness is a jewel buried in the earth. It remains a jewel even in the deep and the dark.
Nevertheless, if there ends up being so much sadness that it just sits on top of the jewel, like a mountain, like the entire Earth, just let it be there, like that. It is not necessary to triumph over it. It is not necessary to protect it. It is not even necessary to write about it. It can happen that even sad-happiness is not enough. At those times, let yourself pass into grief. All that cannot be said cannot be said. Happiness, in the form of sad-happiness, will come again.
Image Credit: Potted green tomato plant growing in room on windowsill by Bacho Nadiradze (2021)