I woke up feeling strange today. There was nothing wrong with me but then again there was nothing right. It was a state that I couldn’t exactly figure out, an as of yet unidentified state. Perhaps it was the beginning of a cold. But no cold had ever felt like this. I wasn’t certain what it was. Could it be something more serious, the beginning of something sinister? Unlikely, but you never know with these things. So I decided I would keep a watchful eye on things even while I went about my daily doings. I watched as I made my bed for any signs of mental  malingers, as I washed my dishes even as I watched the basketball game.

I went for a walk out at the mall and then decided to stop in at the bookstore. I made my way through the aisles, back to my favorite section, turned the corner and smack. I ran right into this man. I was stunned. I looked at him briefly and couldn’t help but stare at the man’s strange appearance. Clad all in a black robe, with sweater and hat, and a long Hasidic Jew beard, but a Jew he was not, for roped about his neck was a large silver cross. I stared at him for a few seconds in shock. The encounter only lasted a few seconds before he regained his bearing and was gone.

I looked in my hands to find a book. He must have accidentally handed it to me and I simply didn’t notice it with all the commotion. I looked about for him, but saw no signs. So I thought I would simply put it back on the shelf. I looked down at the book. The book was open and turned to a page.         

“You are in great danger” the chapter on the page began in bold, black letters. “You  don’t know this, of course, because you like the millions of other citizens on our planet are largely unaware of your surrounding and as a result your life. You have yet to experience life “as it is” and because of this are destined to remain in a state of unknown desperation. You have been hoodwinked by the state of pseudo-happiness that a consumer society conditions you to believe is the real thing.” But if you just give it a while the paragraph continued you would surely experience “life as it is,” unhappiness.

But rest assured, the book told me it had a reliable method for rescuing me from my as of yet unknown state of unhappiness. Could this be it? Could this be what that annoying tickle in the back of my throat and that odd not wrong/not right state of mental blankness was all about? Did I have an emerging case of unhappiness?  I was puzzled and confused.  I closed the book, searched for title amidst all the other books and put it back in its proper place amidst all the other books on the shelf.

I had never considered myself an unhappy person, and yet this book was certain I was. I grew curious I looked at the titles of several of the other books on the shelf. Future Happiness, Total Happiness. The Seven Steps to Happiness.   I never knew that people were starving for happiness, there were as many different types of Happiness as there were types of people!  I started to read some of the books. Happiness one book tells me is easy. Another book tells me that happiness is hard. Still, another says the key to happiness is to be grateful. Be grateful for my state of unhappiness? Now how is that? What I’m looking for is salvation, a solution to my unhappiness not a way to continue it.

But this book assures me that if I simply learn to live it with it, it will disappear on its own(Obviously, this author hasn’t read any medical literature on the spread of germs and viruses.) Still, another book tells me that I need to delay my happiness, that my problem is really the result of impulsiveness. Translation: I needed to suffer just a little more before I’d arrive at Heavens Door. No another book appropriately entitled Be Happy Now insists that I simply need to be present, that Happiness is passing me by that it’s all around us, invading me, now even as I stand here reading this book, that I couldn’t help but be happy, that is, of course, unless I wanted to be unhappy. 

But if I’m happy but really unhappy because I’m not really happy how can I want to be  unhappy when all I really want is to be happy because I’m really unhappy? And I can’t recall being “invaded” by happiness before, but I know what happiness feels like and this, child, ain’t it. All of this makes no sense to me at the moment. In fact, I’ve never felt so unhappy as when I read these words! I feel a bit like a Dr’ Seuss character standing at one of signs with 15 different destinations posted on it, the signs all going this way and that while in front of me lay roads that zigged and zagged and went all kinds of ridiculous directions. HELP!! 

Happiness was so much easier just a few hours ago. Until thenI did my thing and that was that. I rode my bike. I went my way in the world with certainty and happiness. I frolicked about without a care in the world.  I didn’t need to delay it, I didn’t need to be it (which, coincidentally, takes a lot of DOING) and I didn’t need to create vast maps with specific happiness destinations in mind. I just did it and that was that. But now the innocence is gone. Of course the innocence is only my own “indifference to life” as one of the authors might put it.

I wonder if anyone else who came to this aisle felt as overwhelmed and confused as me. I wonder if the girl I saw tentatively reaching for a book caught the absurdity of it all and felt like she too had just ventured into the self-help twilight zone? Could it be that happiness is not the problem that it is our quest for happiness that left us unhappy, that all the theory, solutions, proposals, and ramblings only lead to more confusion and more conflict and thereby more unhappiness?

Is there really a need for happiness or is it some type of conspiracy. Am I really, truly unaware of how I delude myself or do books about delusion create the delusion? After all, if you’re going to have a buyer, you need to have a market for your product. What better way to do so then manufacture desperation, anguish, and  suffering. I’m hoping to arrive at some definitive answers. But all I’m left with, at the moment, is more questions, vastly more. And no answers in sight.  No answers anywhere, anywhere….. 

Does anyone know a good book on the subject I can read?