i think happiness mostly hides in attention.
the first sip of coffee hitting your tongue. the weight of a book in your hands. the pause between notes.
i have spent embarrassing amounts of time believing the next thing would fix me. the next project, next number, next cleaner version of myself. then the thing arrives and, after about ten minutes, becomes furniture.
this is called hedonic adaptation, which is a fancy way of saying the brain is rude.
coffee tastes better after sleepless nights. warmth feels sweeter after bitter cold. we need emptiness to recognize fullness.
and then there's flow - losing track of time, forgetting yourself exists, dissolving into whatever you're doing until the clock jumps three hours. meaning does something similar. so does connection - that moment when someone actually gets it, when you stop performing and just exist in the same room. these feel like different things but they might be the same thing.
intensity doesn't help much. more doesn't help for long.
i keep thinking there's a better way to say this, but maybe there isn't. pay attention to what's already here. that's basically it.
not complicated. just easy to miss.