Happiness is a state of mind, you see. It is not the state of the state. The state of the state is undeveloped and poor, with barren, rocky soil, rockier roads, and BIG rocks that roll down the mountainside and crush the cattle. There is no garbage service, though there is an increasing amount of trash around. There are no police, though there is an increasing number of bandits around. And yet...
When I wake on a cold, cold, cold morning with stiff joints and sandy eyes, I am happy to be cold, stiff, and have sandy eyes. I go to the doorway and look out, and I am happy to see the barren land and the garbage, and also the sun peeking out between the mountains. If I see a bandit walking around, I greet him with a smile and invite him in to take what he wants. Whereupon he is grateful, and smiles, and says, "Thanks!"
Our queen has taught us that we are happy people, because life IS happiness. She has taught us the secret of the inner smile, which is cultivated by looking at life with curiosity and openness, and assuming that life is as it should be, and it is good enough.
(This attitude takes a long time to learn, of course, but it is easy to fake until you get the hang of the real thing.)
Long ago when I was a baby, I would sometimes be crabby and discontent. I would scream and fuss and cry, and holler and pout. But after I had calmed down, my mother would smile a smile made of lips and love, press the smile into her fingers, and rub it gently onto my forehead in little round circles. "Here is a smile for you to use the next time you feel bad," she would say, " But remember...it always there." Then she would wait until my forehead cleared, as it absorbed the love (or the oft-repeated lesson), and then she would let me go.
But as a kid, I would often forget the smile was there. If I was hungry or tired, or angry at my sisters (who sometimes wore their smiles like sneering slivers of hate), I would yell and throw things, and try to smack the awful smiles from their faces! But our parents would find out about it sooner or later, and after letting us fight it out like wild beasts until we were bloody and tired, they would remind us that we are ungrateful morons not worthy of the smiles bestowed upon us; that we only have each other to take care of in this life, and what kind of way is THAT to take care of anybody? Then they would lock us in the stable until such time as we found our misplaced smiles, put them on our cleared foreheads so they could see, and let us out.
By the time I became a teenager, I had mastered the external smile, but still had trouble maintaining the inner smile ... that is because I was half mad. Fortunately, this is considered a normal condition for teenagers where I live. So when the porridge was too runny, or the cheese was taking forever to set, or my sisters were behaving like asses again, I would temporarily become a raving loonie, and be sent to the kicking rock.
The kicking rock is a mushroom-shaped rock just south of the dump, where teenagers gather to bitch and kick chunks out of the splintery surface until they calm down. If my sisters were sent there with me because they truly WERE being ass-ish, a jury of our peers would assemble to listen to us holler out our case, and the oldest and calmest kid in the crowd would decide, with the help of his opinionated bretheren, how many kicks each party must bestow upon the rock to restore peace. If we perform our kicks and it clears our heads, the judge is boosted to the top of the rock to take a bow. If it does not clear our heads, however, there is general mayhem while shards of rock are gleefully and vengefully winged at the unwise intermediary, who on most occasions is swift enough to get away unscathed.
(If no other kids are at the rock when we get there, though, we usually just kick it once and get the hell gone...because it truly stinks there, right next to the dump.)
As an adult, my inner smile is much more steady, and it helps carry me through the tragic events and harsh conditions that are as unavoidable as the blissful moments in this wonderful life we lead. When half the town gets sick, and the other half has to go about bearing the extra burden of work, caring for the sick, and burying the dead, they do it as if nothing is wrong, because nothing IS wrong, or right - it just IS.
When some complete idjit hollers at his yak for crapping on his shoe, and it echoes up the mountain and loosens a giant raft of snow that comes sliding down and buries the man, the yak, and 20 other villagers, the rest of us are glad that it's quieted down again, and that he won't have to clean off his shoe, after all.
"The outer smile is made by the mind to clothe the face," our queen tells us, "but the inner smile is spontaneously present in the human heart, to clothe the spirit."
"The work you do and the effort you expend in caring for yourselves, your animals, the land, and each other increases the happiness of all those around you," her ministers state.
"Happiness a gift bestowed by heaven upon mankind," say her priests, "so that we may felicitate in life's majesty and accept death's mystery with a secure, strong spirit."
Now that I am very old, my happiness is complete. We age, and people around us die, but we do not grieve. The children cry, of course; the teenagers stand around and kick the rock and try not to cry. But the old ones just sit and watch the sick ones suffer, smiling gently.
The sick ones' eyes open and close; their foreheads are sometimes sweaty and furrowed, but sometimes clear, as they feel the last light of their inner smile flow from their body, breath by breath. We give them medicines and rub their aching bodies for as long as it will help, but it will not help forever; nothing will.
And so, as the last breaths blow out, we old ones gather around and press smiles onto our fingertips. We rub them gently, one by one, onto the forehead of the dying person, so he might take them wherever he is going.
After that, if he isn't dead yet, we sing his favorite songs for a while to encourage his spirit to go to whatever happy place the music takes it...
But he STILL is not dead, we all go home and leave him in the care of his family. (They are, by this time, used to the tricks this mischievious old dodger likes to play on them; he is almost 90, after all, and has come close enough to dying to get all the rites twice now...probably in case he can't enjoy them if he ends up dying from a swift hoof to the head, or a slip off a cliff, or the random yet inevitable rock that WILL fall on your head one day - which happens a lot where I live, despite signs the town put up years ago: CAUTION: FALLING ROCKS.)
We understand he's just hedging his bets, as we all do, to one degree or another. But the best way to ensure that you die happy, advises our queen, is to live happy.
And we believe her. :)
I am slowly getting back my internal smile.
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