Being Happy, or Good Enough

I try to think about happiness on a sliding scale instead of as an either/or balance. I don't think anyone can truly be happy all the time, and I'd be highly suspect of anyone who would claim they were. For my part, there are a lot of things about my life that are very good. I've been blessed in many ways, big and small. But there are also things in my life that are not good (again, both big and small). Most days involve trying to reconcile this difference and find some gray area to live inside between the two.

Because of this, I don't think of "good enough" as a compromised version of happiness. The good moments will come as they do, more frequently at some times than others. Most of the problems we have eventually reach some kind of resolution, but there will always be new problems taking their place. None of these highs or lows we experience will ever be constant.

I tend to see things as contradictory absolutes too often. The day went well, or it didn't. I like this shirt, or I don't. I feel secure, or I feel some degree of threat to that security. I'm prepared to face the week, or I'm expecting the week to slap me upside the head for seven straight days. I feel helpless when I can't exert some control over the situations around me, and I feel like a failure when I don't live up to my own standards. A lot of my happiest moments aren't fist-pumping triumphs, but rather quiet and appreciated moments of relief that things simply worked out for the best.

Last Friday as people were sharing their plans for Easter weekend, I kept telling them I was just going to have a typical Sunday. Usually this was met with either tempered pity (and sometimes not terribly well-disguised) or semi-curiosity. When I'd explain that my father just had knee surgery and was scheduled to go home on Sunday, and that my sister had taken a shift at work for holiday hours that day (hospitals don't take days off, which I guess applies in both cases here) and we'd be celebrating the following weekend instead because we also had two family birthdays we'd be bundling in, then it made more sense. So while so many other people around me were engaged in holiday celebrations with family and friends, I had a pretty typical Sunday, outside of driving out to my parents' house early in the morning to pick up their dogs before my father got home from the hospital. I read the paper, did some laundry, caught up on school work, took a stab at some writing, and took a nap with the dogs. Not such a bad Sunday, but not exactly what most people would think of as a memorable Easter.

But the way I saw it, it was a nice quiet pause in what can otherwise become a complicated life. And I could still celebrate the holiday with both my mother and father next weekend, because my father made it through his surgery successfully. And I could still celebrate my sister's birthday, because she didn't die when her car was destroyed over a year ago. And I could have taken a nap today anyway, but today I got to do it with two dogs curled up beside me. And when I took the dogs outside after dinner, the sun was still out and the air had the temperate cool feel of early spring.

So, as far as I'm concerned, today was easily good enough.