I’m feeling happy right now. It’s so good. It’s so novel.

Like. This is new for me, right. This is a new thing for me to feel at all.

I’m noticing, I think—it’s distinct, and it’s not that I’m equating the two, but there is a part of euphoria in happiness, as I understand it.

Like, happiness as I am defining it here, this feeling that I get, it’s… there’s an element that depends on a certain kind of a connection that I did not possess before.

Like, it relies as one of many preconditions on my existing as a person in this world. I have to be able to feel myself. I have to have some kind of awareness of myself and my humanity and how it relates to my body and to others and to this whole shared space that we inhabit, that contains all of these other emotions, right. That serves as the medium for all of these forms of contact and human connection and meaning.

It’s this groundedness, like lying on a patch of warm bedrock in the forest, running your fingers through the moss. But, you know. Of being. Of knowing, and appreciating and enjoying the texture of the passage of the fact of a thing, from one juncture to another.

And I can’t do that if I don’t exist. I can’t see it, I can’t feel it. It just stops at the borders of me.

It’s a shared euphoria in the other, in the moment, in the universal, and it hits me like that spark of understanding of the most brilliantly obvious joke in the world.

It’s a joke without the humor.

Like, what I am calling happiness here, it’s a love of the privilege of connecting to something outside of my self, and enjoying the completeness it brings to my hold on reality—at least for that one gentle moment.

It’s this recognition that I exist as a part of the world, as a facet of all of its love, and that this is good.