“When the moment ends, we find ourselves feeling the same old feeling of wanting more happiness, and we start searching for the next thing that occupies our time and distracts us from what is most important in our lives and all those around us.” Wendy Schaller in a letter to her children
Now and then, my mother will write her thoughts on paper and send them to my siblings and me in an email or a lengthy text message. Her letters are everything I’ve ever wanted my writings to be: intentional and succinct, with a little dramatic flair sprinkled amongst the commas. MFA students and aspiring authors have spent years scraping their prose along the sidewalk to achieve this writing style, but it comes naturally to my mom. Recently I was re-reading a letter she wrote to us about her trip to Nashville when I stopped at the line I’ve quoted above. The phrase “the same old feeling” rolled around in my head for the rest of the day and I shook my fist in the air because she was right about something, yet again.
I have found that happiness, for me, is like a seesaw. I’m either up, down, or teetering somewhere in the middle between contentedness and despair. My seesaw moves throughout the day, changing with the levels of humidity in the summer air. I like to think that most people’s emotions fluctuate as much mine, but I’m starting to realize that it doesn’t really matter.
I stopped writing for fun about six months ago, around the time that I was studying to retake the LSAT. The deeper I went into the cave of logically reasoning, the further I became from my creative endeavors. It was a strange, out-of-body experience, leaving one side of myself behind as I worked to improve another side. I told myself that I was taking a break from writing and blogging to put all of my energy into my LSAT study. I convinced myself that I could only live one truth at a time. My anxiety heightened, and I tried to alleviate the symptoms with deep breathing exercises and naturally fermented sauerkraut.
But why can we not have many sides? Are we circles of men or are we hexagons of womanhood? I know I’m not the first or fiftieth humanoid to ask this question. I am no prophet — and here’s no great matter.
Join me on the balance beam of life, will you? The air is clean and crisp up here, and a pillow of freshly baked gnocchi awaits us if we fall. In the meantime, I plan to post as much as I can until equilibrium strikes. Cheers!
Non Epiphany 