Imagine warm rain on a summer afternoon. You step outside without an umbrella because there is no point. It touches your face, your shoulders, the backs of your hands. You are wet. By the next street, the sun is out and you have started to dry. You did not lose the rain. The rain happened. And now this is happening.
Happiness is not a destination. We are told it is, and we spend lives trying to get there. We prepare ourselves in case it might visit.
But happiness behaves more like rain. It touches us and passes. It is a feeling, with a beginning and a middle and an end. You cannot stay wet.
The gripping is the thing that keeps it at arm's length. We hold on and panic when it fades, and the panic is louder than the fading. So we miss the next wave already on its way.
The steadier kind of contentment is not in the chase. It is in the ordinary mundane. The cup of tea that did not have to be perfect to be enough. Five minutes by the window when nothing was happening. The breath you took without naming it.
Happiness is the weather. Contentment is the climate.
When you notice a small good feeling, do nothing with it. Do not photograph it. Do not text it to anyone. Do not stretch it.
Just notice it. Let it touch you. Let it go.
See if not gripping it changes how often it comes.
What ordinary thing in your life have you stopped noticing precisely because it never went away? Feel free to message me with something that comes to mind.
This week, I will let happiness be weather, not a destination.
It has been a very busy week this week with council and such like so I haven't had time to record. So I picked something that fits my thoughts this week.
Stillness in the Storms 62, The Paradox of Happiness - where I first sat with this question, back in 2021. https://stillnessinthestorms.com/episode/the-paradox-of-happiness
Inner Peace Meditations 92, Morning Abundance - a short practice where you briefly imagine each ordinary support not being there, then let it return. The chair. The quilt. The kettle. The cup. The ordinary returns extraordinary. https://innerpeacemeditations.com/episode/morning-abundance-seeing-what-was-always-there
Yesterday morning, for about an hour, my body was perfect. No spasms. My hands were loose. Everything at ease. Later, on a car journey, the spasms came back. As I started to suffer with annoyance that they were back, I started thinking if only my life would be just like that hour and what would it be like to have no spasms just like that.
And then I caught myself again. Because even that would become normal. After a week, after a day, after an afternoon, it would be the ordinary one. Whatever I clung to would have dried.
That, I think, is the trap. We tell ourselves there is a destination called happy. But we have never stayed anywhere. Any good experience, in the end, is an experience. It comes. It touches us. It goes. Happiness is getting wet.
The work is to let go a little earlier than we want to. To enjoy the moment fully, and then, when it begins to fade, not to chase it. If happiness was a destination, every passing moment of it would be a small failure. Because it is weather, every passing moment is just weather. Another will come. Another always does.
Be gentle with yourself this week. You do not have to stay wet to have been touched by the rain.
Much love, Steven
Dave, Michael, Karen, Laura, David, Jenna and Mia, Johnny and the kind anonymous souls and everyone on Insight Timer. Your kind donations and support means everybody gets to hear my meditations and my podcast without adverts and without restrictions. You are all awesome.
If you would like to support, listen to the podcast, or just say hello: stevenwebb.uk