Happiness Deserve

“They deserve to be happy, don’t they?”

A barb aimed at my heart.

There’s a song for that. “It Don’t Matter to Me,” by Bread wasn’t a suffer-through but it wasn’t a favorite, either. At 13, a decade after release, I was already exercising my inner music critic. Though, melodically lovely, the lyrics were unfathomable as true, disastrously hollow-spoke and even more skewed by the awkward step-ball tempo-change stanza. Preposterous posturing. No one really feels this way.

“If you love someone, let them go,” was never my favorite saying, either. I didn’t buy into the decade of free-love, exploration release and romantic unselfishness, so it’s taken me a while to pin down my feelings on that agitated charge.

Happiness is not a privilege.

It’s not a right, either. It’s an elusive chase that doesn’t have to be that way.

Life ebbs and flows, and there are things that even enthusiasm can’t make happen. Yet we continue to try push them forward, hold them back, or to hold ourselves together and are crushed when the vision and effort both fail.

I don’t believe someone deserves to be happy at someone else’s expense. I also don’t think the expense we assign to our disappointment is always or ever factually proportionate.

The perception that someone’s happiness must come at someone else’s cost is inaccurate. Not getting what we want does not preclude it. Not having things go our way should not negate it. The way to happiness is not over, undermining, or through anyone else. It’s not based on winning the competition; because it’s not even based on a game.

Most happiness is based on the assumption that we will know it when we see it.

It seems, we really only recognize it having dragged it along behind us for decades. Originally thought unflattering, old photographs show us what we were, and that what we were was fine, and that back then, who we were should have been happy with who we were. These current snap-shot days should have the same impact.

Today’s internet is full of one-line “if you love someone” quotes, musings, and rationalizations claiming it is possible to be happy for another, even if their happiness does not include you. This might be true, but letting go is still letting go, and time isn’t always on our side. Higher forces are always at work, and all we really need to know are the answers to these two simple questions.

Who deserves to be happy? No one.

Who can be happy? Every one.

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