“Simple Happiness”

“Against this outlook, Skylar took his stand. Whether through the fairy tales he had been exposed to as a child or the literature he had read as a youth, through the lessons he had learned from films or from simply watching adults in his environment, the seeker knew that happiness and peace could not be found by trying to stop the wheel of one’s fortune when it reached its summit. Millionaires often lacked workmen’s peace of mind. Ravishingly beautiful women committed suicide or became alcoholics. Great athletes got imprisoned for spousal abuse. Executives and owners of businesses raced constantly from meeting to conference, never having a moment’s peace. Instinctively, Skylar realized that a simple farmer seated by an autumn fire next to his wrinkled and silver-topped wife of forty years had a better chance of being truly happy than any of the globe-wandering elite. Remembering his own childhood, he could swear that sublime happiness required no more than a field of grass and the air of spring, catalyzed by the uncorked imagination of a dreamer. He recalled the joy of cutting strips of homemade noodles and helping fry freshly formed doughnuts in his Grandma Elsa’s kitchen, an impoverished setting from a Depression-era farmhouse. Memories reminded him of the serene spell exercised on him by a handful of pebbles: some sharp-edged and rough to the touch, some glinting with diamantine pinpoints, some smooth, flat, and black, and of the happy hours he spent on laundry days on an unsheeted bed with his pencil-soldiers and ruler-boats.”