memory

I had a great time this weekend. I wish I had taken a few pictures of everybody together. Ah, well.

I have a few very sense-based memories, and sometimes I'll smell something or feel something and I'm suddenly thrown right back into how I felt at that moment. Really hot, relentless sun beating down reminds me of walking to play tennis with Tim. Not playing the tennis, walking to the court. I'm half zoned out, half listening to Tim talk, spinning my racket and thinking about playing the game, half thinking about a sandwich since we always walked past jimmy john's to get there, thinking a little bit about what we'll be doing later but mostly just feeling the sun and the racket. Not wanting to be anywhere else or doing anything but exactly what I was doing.

I think that's pretty much my personal definition of happiness. Not wanting to be anywhere else or doing anything else. I really liked this article in the New York Times because he says it a thousand times more elegantly than I could:

"I suspect there is something inherently misguided and self-defeating and hopeless about any deliberate campaign to achieve happiness. Perhaps the reason we so often experience happiness only in hindsight, and that chasing it is such a fool’s errand, is that happiness isn’t a goal in itself but is only an aftereffect. It’s the consequence of having lived in the way that we’re supposed to — by which I don’t mean ethically correctly so much as just consciously, fully engaged in the business of living."

Emphasis mine. Anyway, I've been happy here (in Texas) and I guess what I've got to do is get a little more engaged in Baltimore. Avert my vision.