Between Fear and Longing

By Greg -
Being where you ought to be, with no doubt that you are doing exactly what you ought to do, might be in the clutches of a lion, or at a desk in a sterile office building. Happiness is rarely found, and then only briefly, in a lounge chair surrounded by slaves attending to your whimsy. Happiness is the impossibility of anything else taking the place of the moment we currently occupy. In a life or death struggle, no thought interferes with the necessity of doing what we're doing right now. Are we happiest when our options collapse to one, necessary choice, regardless of the circumstances that focused our attention on the preeminent "now?" I think so. The present always satisfies, whether it's painful or joyful, whether it's filled with exigencies or void of responsibility.

The pursuit of happiness, then, would seem to be an oxymoron. The mythology of our time is the idea of God, become Man, finding His way home. Civilization persists and is driven forward by the idea of restoring the lost utopia that was, long ago, before fear and longing, the bliss of the perpetual present. But heaven is as impossible as life after death, and as self-contradictory as a supernatural God, or a timeless Law. Religion makes sense only if we devalue the present as a mere shadow of a truth more real than reality, only if we resign ourselves to happiness as a pursuit rather than a condition.

Happiness doesn't negate time, but Paradise does; heaven stands fixed at the end of time, just as the creator God stands fixed at its beginning. Paradise is the closed circle that collapses to a dimensionless point and disappears from the universe. And is death really what we want?

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