Happiness Cycles

I am 44.

The other day I was thinking about whether I was happy. Actually, I was really questioning when I forgot how to be happy. At the moment I was feeling sad, trapped and stagnating.

It just seems like somewhere along the way I lost the ability to find joy in the moment and understand how to live in the moment. I was pondering this while driving from a work meeting that kept me at the office until a bit past 8:00. Maybe I was just tired; regardless, there was nothing about my day, or the meeting or the fact that I was heading home to a loving boyfriend who moments ago on the telephone expressed genuine joy about the fact that I was indeed on my way to see him rather than go to my house. And yet I was sort of sad and pondering existential happiness.

For some reason I associate such existential dilemmas on adolescents. As a teenager I don’t believe I had this kind of angst, but it is the kind of spiral of that launches into the meaning of life and ends in a drunken stupor that I see as the struggle of the teen years. A more precise analysis would probably conclude that these crisis’s is cyclical. At many stages of our lives we look at where we are and start to think it is not where we want to be so we start to wax and spin about loosing something and missing some sort of past innocence.

It is easy to chock this all up to fear of impending mortality. It is easy to say all we need to do is be more zen and accept. All life might be suffering and it might be better to let it go, but what is the fun in that? The fact is every twelve to fifteen years (if we are lucky) we are going to look down at the wrinkles in our hands and wonder where did the fingers of youth go?

As children we long to be older so we can be taller or have more freedom or finally have sex. When was the point when we began to look backwards. Was it sometime in our twenties when we realized that this is all there is. (There is a good song with those lyrics).

Now at 44 I am healthy, financially stable and in relatively good shape. I am one of those gay men who can look back at the twenty something version of me and honestly say I am in better shape. My face was more youthful, but it wasn’t until my early 30’s that I started eating right and working out – so its not like I want to return to the body of that me – but I do long to go back and make some different decisions, to not have been afraid to leave the closet and really have a chance to explore.

In this cycle – I hope I can make peace with the me who mature, looks good with a few wrinkles and open to living life to the fullest.