Happiness

[reverie]

See Writer's Workshop for previous drafts here

 

12/03/2007

 

To be without desire is to

be content. But contentment is not

happiness. – Max Ehrmann

 

Happiness

by Sean Honea

 

Ehrmann qualified it in rational terms:

happiness equals the desire to work

to obtain success.

 

Brother stressed

the more immediate:

“happiness is finding out

she’s not pregnant” – she

being the girl whose name,

you can’t quite recall but seem

to remember encountering on,

at most, two separate occasions

both of which while drunk.

 

For my part, I do not hang

my happiness on the

“pursuit of beloved labor”

or its avoidance. At least

that is what I tell myself now

when trying to figure out

what it actually means to be content,

and how, and when, and when not.

Edited December 3, 2007 by reverie