Stopping to Ask - May 31 2025

 

Stopping to Ask

May 31 2025



You don’t know when you’re happy.

It’s only looking back

you understand

perhaps even envy.

Because in the moment,

in the flow,

in the ungraspable now

you lose yourself;

immersed, and unselfaware.

If life is a river

  — running from its source

in a bubbly spring,

and ending in a slow silty floodplain —

it’s the whitewater stretches you live for,

swept

down a rocky narrows

or steep descent;

when, in the mad rush downstream

your next breath

is all you can think of.

You don’t know

how good you have it,

my father would chide when we complained.

Was I happy then?

Or is it memory

playing its usual tricks

of conveniently forgetting?

The bad, the good

   . . . it all depends.

Of course, definition is key.

Is happiness joy

well-being

contentment?

Fulfilment

glee

possession?

Or simply living with integrity;

being true to yourself

even when no one’s looking?

Are hedonists happy

is that the key?

Do ascetics have the secret to the good life?

Or is moderation the answer,

the average man

taking care

of his average family?

Should we even be seeking

or does that push it away?

Am I happy now?

Or is the question self-defeating?

Is the act of asking

like fighting the current instead of riding it,

like clinging to a rock

while the thoughts flood frantically in?

Which they always do

when I stop to ask.

So will I drown in introspection

or am I better off surrendering;

becoming water-in-water

and losing myself?

They say that bad things have salience. After all, selective memory for the bad serves survival: we should have a negativity bias. You don’t last long or pass on your genes if you forget the place where the leopard jumped out. So it makes sense that when I examine my past, I’m hard on myself and tend to focus on regret. Yet it seems most people don’t. They look back through the golden haze of nostalgia and the bad things recede, fade, get dismissed; while the good things emerge clearly: brightly buffed, their rough edges smoothed off.

There is a perennial debate about the definition of happiness, about what makes “the good life”. Is it pleasures of the body, the moments of contentment? Is it sensation, meaning, love? A life of creativity? Leaving a legacy? Living with purpose? Achieving some goal? The US Constitution extols “the search for happiness”. But the key word is search: which I take to mean that happiness is not the destination, it’s the journey. So it’s not something you aim for; it comes of itself when you find the life that works for you. And although the word “happiness” sounds shallow, ephemeral, and almost brittle, the founders — who were well-schooled in the classics — understood it in the Aristotelian sense: a complete life of virtue and balance, actualized through reason and ethical behaviour. Happiness is not just the momentary thrill of a roller coaster ride, or the feeling of satisfaction after a good meal with friends.

We’re told to be self aware. Good advice. But too much introspection — which I’m certainly guilty of — isn’t that; and instead of adding to happiness, can detract from it.

But while all these thoughts appear in the poem, it’s mostly a celebration of the so-called “flow state”. I think this is where we find ourselves truly happy, or at least most happy. It’s what all our happy moments have in common. Fortunately for me, my easiest way into it is writing. Every poem arises from a flow state. So instead of a rushing river (an apt call-back to my younger days as an avid whitewater kayaker!), I lose myself in words.