Happy but not Content

I've come to realize that I am, whatever momentary storm clouds of despair may float across my subconscious, incredibly and stupidly happy. I have so many things in this life to be happy about. I've managed to come through the public educational system virtually unscathed, with the ability to at least fool myself into believing that I can think for myself. Opportunities abound for me, and my future actually looks like it might have promise - I may never have the chance to do anything great, but I will have ample chances to do something good, maybe even lasting. I've had money enough to experience life without obsessing about survival, yet not enough to take away a sense of the value of a hard day's work.

There are many things on this earth that I honestly love. There are great roaring fires in the family hearth that keep away the bitterness of a winter night. There is good food to be eaten, good tobacco to fill my pipe, strong drink to fill my cup. There is wind in the trees that sounds like poetry, and poetry when read that sounds like music, and music that sounds like hope, or rage, or sadness, or love, or peace, or passion. There is Shakespeare, and Milton, Coleridge and Wordsworth, T.S. Elliott and Robert Frost. There is Poe, Joyce, Faulkner, Steinbeck, Kerouac, Tolkien and Lewis, and a million others. Pages and pages of dreams that remind us how much more there is beyond our own petty little lives. There is a smile from a beautiful stranger, the shared pleasure of a beaming child, the love of a loyal dog with his head resting across your lap.

There are memories: of walks under the moon, of football games played or watched, of little league, of my own drunken (figurative or literal) stupidity, of girls I've kissed and those I wish I had, of songs sung, dances danced, of life...lived.

And I am especially happy for those people - friends and family alike - who intrude on my solitude, who break me away from myself and my own egomania. People who, no matter how much you despise them from moment to moment, inspire you to love fiercely because they accept you for yourself even when you don't know who or what that is. People who somehow help you towards becoming the person you think you should become.

Here's the thing though. All these things make me happy because they remind me of home - and I don't mean Lexington, VA. I mean Home. I mean that place from which we've all been expelled or exiled, or just lost. You can call it whatever you want - Heaven, Never Never Land, the place between awake and asleep where you can still remember dreaming, The Far Country.
So I know that I will never always be happy. I know that things can go wrong for me - that my good life could end. But even when I am most satisfied, I know I will never be completely content. I can surround myself with all those things that remind me of home, but they will never be home. At my happiest there is that hunger, that pit of longing and desire for something that I know is so much better - like when you look at pictures of someone you've loved and lost. You love the picture, and couldn't part with it - but in some ways it actually makes the pain far worse. So, I'll keep searching for the hidden country, the door to the lost city, the key to a forgotten language, the leaf, the stone, the door. One day, God willing, I'll make my way back to Ithaca and the things I love then won't fill me with biting sadness, but with simple, happy, fierce content.