I looked back through all my old Blog-Posts... For the first 4 months, I posted once a week. Over the whole next year, I only posted 5 times. I really meant to Blog more... I guess I just wanted to make sure I had something significant to say---this isn't Twitter, after all... But I guess more than anything, I just forget... But I intend to remedy that.
At any rate...
Most of my childhood is quite a blur...so much went on, so much has happened since, & I was so young... But one of my most vivid memories is from when I was about 4. Life was so simple back then... It was during the summer, on an incredibly warm day. I was standing just inside the open front door, looking outside, enjoying the heat of the sun beating down on me. There was an empty box of popsicles sitting on the chair next to me...
And there was this smell in the air...I don't know that it was a single, specific smell...probably more of a conglomeration of various smells...but there was something incredibly unique & memorable about it... The human sense of smell bypasses the Thalamus, making it more directly connected to memory than the other senses.
But standing there in the sun, & smelling that smell, I just remember the feeling going through my mind that "Life is good...I'm happy in life..." Within a few years things changed drastically in my life, especially emotionally. But I never forgot that day, that smell, & that feeling... Then when I was about 9 or so, one day in the late Spring, I smelled that incredible smell again...and then again when I was about 12...and both times the memory came rushing back like a tidal wave... Ever since then I've longed & ached to smell that smell again...to remember so much more vividly than normally possible to remember what it was like to be happy in life...
I've never been happy in life since that day...so long ago... I've had happy moments, & even happy times, of course. But never any lasting period of happiness in my life... I look back, & so much of my life I just don't remember...I think it's that way with most people, because so much of it is just day-to-day stuff that really didn't matter in the long run... But when I think of the things I do remember, I have more disappointments & regrets than I do satisfactions... And where I'm at in life right now gives me very, very few satisfactions... There's just so much...missing...in my life...and in myself...and in the place where those things should be, all I find is that same lack of happiness...
"The Grand essentials of happiness are: something to do, something to love, and something to hope for."
