Tag: self-awareness

Happiness

Published on by Maciej ModzelewskiLeave a comment

If someone asked me if I was happy, I honestly wouldn’t know
what to say—not because I don’t know myself,
but because I don’t know what I’m being asked.

Happiness is one of those buzzwords that’s been around since time immemorial
and supposedly puts us above the paramecium, to name just one,
but I feel like we would have understood temporal multidimensionality sooner,
even though physics professors who study it are few and far between;
yet it can’t simply be reduced to an exercise in stale semantics.

So what is this chimaera we chase to the point of obsession,
or should I say, this phantom itch we don’t know how to scratch?
Whatever it is, there will always be those all too happy
to make a killing on the back of it.

Not much of a lesson

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I had a stew
made with butternut squash,
sweet potatoes,
and sun-dried tomatoes
for dinner tonight—a humble result
of emptying the fridge into a pot
in the hope that the final product
would be edible—while listening to Joni
when the thought came to me
how utterly ridiculous creatures we are,
stuffing our mouths
only to excrete some hours later,
repeating it over and over again like markers
in an indefinite stretch of time between now and then,
and in the end none of us is any wiser;
everyone is just making it up as they go,
but perhaps some are better
at pretending
that they know clouds.

The scarecrow

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I was never in a hurry to learn how to play an old man—heck, being a responsible adult
was already a challenge—because I always had plenty of time to do so, or so I thought,
until the day I woke up and realised with horror that the scarecrow was already on the horizon.
I wonder if that’s why they call it the golden birthday, except I have a sneaking suspicion
it’ll turn out to be made of pyrite.

The bright side

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The memory of each mistake, like a complementary mishap
to the countless accidents that all too often fill life, is the lullaby
that accompanies me every night as I rest my head on the pillow
of an empty bed, and yet I still consider myself lucky—at least
I no longer have to smile.

Romantic love

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There is no question that I would like to know the answer to
more than: Why do people have to love people, anyway?
I guess it will remain as much of a mystery now as it was then.
At least spelling is no longer a problem, even for a dyslexic like me.
But I could use a bit of that ‘easy come, easy go’ attitude,
if only to save face—after all, not every hopeless romantic can live
up to the silver screen.

Lucky

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Between Harry’s pecan pie and Sally’s ham sandwich,
I had a square of dark chocolate, and then it came to me
that if he can hide a disappointment and she can fake an orgasm,
I can consider myself lucky—in the end, no one hated me;
they were just indifferent, and though not quite what I expected,
what fun would it be to always know in advance
that love was what you pretended it to be?

Just a week

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Time flies when you’re having fun, or so they say,
but to be honest, I can’t really call my life fun-filled,
yet five decades have flown by in the blink of an eye
without me even noticing, and now I’m staring
at a white-bearded face looking back from the mirror
and wondering what was the point in laughing
at that kid who thought fifty years was a long time
when I probably have twenty or thirty more to go
and can’t even imagine making it through a week
of family Christmas gatherings.

Lessons in dying

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He who has learned to die has unlearned slavery
The Good Book. Consolations. 27:29. Made by A. C. Grayling (2016)

I’ve never been fifty before, so this should be interesting,
like the day I finally decided to be happy—as if becoming a merry chap
greeting fellow carousers with a pint in his hand could assuage the guilt
I’d accumulated over the years—by taking dying classes
on a maternity ward.

Joy to the world

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Nothing heralds the arrival of the month of forced joy better
than binge-watching Hallmark Christmas flicks—only slightly
toned down by a reserved immersion in Russell and Hitchens
during the commercials—with all the remarkably irrelevant
characters in the spectacle of self-inflicted sorrow that some
call the holidays. After all, even a die-hard atheist like myself
deserves his guilty pleasures.