Thursday, June 14, 2007

There are some summer days that are made for the picture frame.
Yesterday was one of those days. Not that we did anything exceptionally special. All we did was sit on a faded blue towel on the grassy waterfront in the Old Port in Montreal and have take-out lunch, joke around and strum some tunes on my guitar. We tanned, we made random comments, we watched the people biking, rollerblading, walking, listened to the teenagers behind us laughing and chasing each other with water. It was a combination of the sunny, cloudless day, idle ambiance and company of good friends that made it so golden.
Don't we chase after this in life sometimes? Or all the time? Isn't this what the American Dream is about? Being happy? I'm not going to write about something that's already been written about in Mikhail's Exospective. As my good friend so eloquently stated, "here is nothing and there is something". We can't make those Kodak moments last for longer than they do. We may forget about them a month, a week, or even a day after. I've discovered that happiness doesn't live here in this world we inhabit. It's not something that can be tasted or called upon but something that comes from elsewhere. And if we contend that heaven is imbued with happiness then we agree that we taste heaven when we are truly happy. So, then, I often find myself re-examining the priorities that our culture has impressed upon me and reject the way of thinking into which I've been assimilated.
Maybe we try too hard to find happiness in a place where it cannot be found. Maybe we need to start looking elsewhere and believing that it lies there.