Happiness and Moments

So many things happen for only a moment.

Think about it.

I was just watching one of my cats, sitting at the top of the kitty jungle gym in my home office, and the late afternoon sun — during the few moments before it set behind the mountains — illuminated her little perch with perfect golden light. It lasted only for 30 seconds, tops.

I was fortunate to have a camera nearby, although a still image fails to capture the real moment.

We watch children playing and there's a perfect moment when everybody in the summer backyard is enjoying the bubble maker and the same sense of magic suddenly crosses all the faces simultaneously as a particularly large bubble drifts off towards the sky.

I sit on a big log by the beach, watching a pod of orcas go by. It happens from time to time, around here, but it's not exactly common and when we do see them we get to enjoy them for just a few moments.

And then the sun sets and the distant clouds on the the sky are ablaze — for just a couple of minutes, and then it's all gone.

These are all moments. They're not anything permanent; they're not anything that we can put in our pocket and keep with us. They're fleeting experiences that for just a very short while leaves us with a sense of awe at how amazing this world around us is.

I think of all these moments as I also contemplate this thing we call "the pursuit of happiness." Much to our detriment — at least as far as I'm concerned — we've been marketed this idea that happiness can be a permanent state; a thing that we can attain and hold on to and have in our lives.

But what is happiness but a few brief moments that mark the extreme highlights of our world?

Purveying happiness as a state of permanence is, indeed, doing us a disservice.

That notion makes us pursue things that aren't even possible. What's more, most of these statements about the pursuit of happiness as something we can own and have are little more than marketing messages designed to make us part with our hard earned cash in the vain hope that doing so will give us something that can't — as I mentioned — even exist.

In many ways, true happiness is as fleeting as an orgasm. We may long for it as a pinnacle of what it means to be alive, but the experience itself is brief — intense, but brief.

One of my spiritual teachers of many years ago once observed that "as long as you are in the pursuit of enlightenment, you're openly confessing to the world that you don't HAVE enlightenment!: How so? Well, if you're pursuing it, you're saying that you don't have it!

Perhaps the wisest thing we can do for ourselves is to stop pursuing happiness and instead find it in all those small moments around us, be that a warm smile from a random stranger, a moment of connection with another person so intense it feels like you merge into one, that amazing sunset that lasts two minutes, the beauty of a rose before it wilts and fades away, a kitten stalking a grasshopper with great seriousness… all these are the individual pieces in the mosaic that we perhaps can call happiness.

Thanks for stopping by, and have a great remainder of your week!

How about YOU? What does happiness mean, to YOU? Do you find it in small moments? Do you think permanent happiness is possible? Do you ever think people miss out on life because they are too focused on finding happiness? Leave a comment if you feel so inclined — share your experiences — be part of the conversation!

(All text and images by the author, unless otherwise credited. This is ORIGINAL CONTENT, created expressly for this platform — Not posted elsewhere!)

Created at 2025.10.15 18:47 PDT
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