Hector and the Search for Happiness

If you’re looking for a good pick-me-up movie that puts life in perspective, that regales you with gorgeous, panoramic scenery and fills your senses with music and color, that carries you on an emotional journey of sadness, fear and happiness, then watch Hector and the Search for Happiness. Simon Pegg is a psychiatrist grown weary of what he perceives as his patients’ petty issues. The rich “stay-at-home” mom who declares she’s at the end of her rope as she prepares to depart with her daughter on a 10-day cruise. The psychic who’s lost her connection with the universe, who ultimately plays a crucial role in Hector’s search. The journey to China, Africa, where he’s nearly killed, and finally LA in search of a lost love provide him with insight into his quest to understand what makes people happy.

Perhaps the most poignant moment was when Hector found himself standing beneath hand-cut Tibetan prayer flags fluttering with such force from the mountain wind it is as if they might fly off on their own search at any moment. He stands there, his face tight in concentration, or in sadness, as the Tibetan monk holds up his hands, beaming, and others dance around him beneath the life and breath and brilliance of the flags. He cannot join them. Or he feels that this extreme experience of happiness is beyond him. That perhaps what’s wrong with his life and those of others is that they have not experienced the torture and persecution of the Tibetan monks; maybe this is what allows them to feel so deeply.

To feel exuberant, to welcome it, to embrace it first requires knowing what it is to be without it. How can happiness even exist without pain? How would we know what it was if we never felt sad? Perhaps the key to happiness lies in allowing ourselves to experience all emotions, to embrace them regardless of their effect, but to let them go when the time comes, even happiness. To not cling to it but appreciate it when it arrives. To know that just as there will be times when we feel unhappy, there will be times when happiness visits us, if we let it. To do so, one must be present in the moment. Cliche, but I’ve come to believe it is the secret to an ultimately happy and contented life. To live in the now, to feel what’s around us and within us, to be open to what comes next without fixating on it. To accept what came in the past without living in it. To appreciate this life. To just be.

A Meditation on Time

There’s a fire in the distance, to the east. It could be someone burning. Burning in the countryside, the woodpile you’ve watched for months, finally the time arrives. Arrange the kindling, gather some leaves, light the fire, watch it burn. Tend to it, until there’s nothing left to tend. Dead and blackened like night. Cold and stark. Like life feels when we fail to seize it; to savor the seconds. They will not come again. There is never that last second back. Time only marches forward…unyielding, unending. Always fleeting, moving toward or away from us eternally.

The present moment eludes us, this very second in which we exist in perfect unison with time, our life aligned with time. The very moment in which we are living. Pinks of the fading sunset reflecting off the lake. Gentle contrast to the muted blues of a softening sky. Trees devoid of leaves. Evergreens turning black in the dusk. This, the passage of time; this, which must be seized.