The secret of happiness is simple: find out what you truly love to do and then direct all of your energy towards doing it. Once you do this, abundance flows into your life and all your desires are filled with ease and grace. ~ RS
I snorted.
Morgan looked up from the quote she was reading. She had a patient air about her. She was the perfect roommate, and at the perfect age when her ideals are still armed with childlike readiness to put up with my leathery resignation.
Or maybe she’s just English.
Either way, I had to explain why I reacted so snobby. We still had a few more weeks together; I didn’t think it was very wise to offend a roommate, regardless of her innocence and momentary vegetarianism.
I said,
“Humans are not monogamists by nature. They fret and fettle and get bored too quickly. As soon as they decide to fall in love with one thing, everything else becomes more attractive. While agreeing that happiness is attainable by loving what you do, and doing what you love, I wonder how long does love last at all?”
And she said something that took years away and almost made me as unwrinkled as her,
“Aren’t we supposed to live in the present?”
What is happiness and love if detached from the present? What is love, even the shortest-lived, if not marked with attentiveness?
Maybe I’m just at an age where I’m too old to believe that loyalty can last longer than profit, yet not old enough to have faith in the profit of loyalty.
No matter how old, though, time remains at the speed of 60 minutes/hour. And profitable things do come off dedicated attention; the selective selling out of everything else besides.
At the speed of sixty minutes per hour.
Maybe the only fault in the quote above was to put “life” and “abundance” in the same sentence with words like “ease” and “grace”. We are too stout and old and attention-deficit to imagine ourselves gliding anywhere through life, or even through Tuesday night.
Maybe the polyamorous human is more fit to waddle and stumble over and over, instead, in short and stout and sincere bouts. Little by little, across the vast terrain. Little by little, like monogamist penguins.
Yes, that’s more like us, isn’t it? More doable.
