The Eye of a Needle

One of the things that Julie finds difficult at the moment is threading a needle.  The medication gives her hands a fine tremor that make it almost impossible to line up the thread accurately with the eye.  She stabs away, frustrated, licking the end of the thread into a wet point.

In the same way, she has difficulty attaining happiness.  For some people, at certain times in their life, the approach to happiness is a wide open gate.  A good meal, a phone call from a friend, a warm bath, and they are happy.  For many of us, at certain times in our lives, these simple pleasures give a deep and true sense of happiness.

At other times, happiness can be reached only through a narrow gate.  For some people this is, perhaps, the only experience they ever have of happiness.  To pass through the gate requires intense concentration - and a favourable conjunction of many planets.  There must have been a good night's sleep, the right diet, some exercise, a new friendship, a rewarding encounter, the humiliation of an old enemy, and a blue sky.  Sometimes by coincidence it all comes together, and some freakish momentum launches them through the gate where they find themselves briefly assailed by the strange emotion that is happiness. Most of the time they are thwarted by their own unsteady hand: they see the gate, they weave towards it, and at the last minute are blown off-course by some unexpected fear, or unease, or the siren voices that tell them that the gate is not for them, that they do not deserve to pass through it.

At the moment, fragile and recovering, the least thing buffets Julie away from her gate of happiness.  This week has been a good week: when I arrived at my family training course on Thursday night I could proudly announce that for once we had had a very good week.  Even so, I came home that same night to find Julie rocking on the sofa, inconsolable.  For brief periods she has experienced real happiness, but the next day has been terrified to leave my side.  Even though I still count this week as one of the best we have had this year, I have to admit that at other times in this same week she has been as disturbed, as frightened, as confused as I have ever seen her.

Perhaps it is the happiness itself that spooks her: it is so transitory, like snowflakes.  She is afraid to embrace it, to revel in it.  Perhaps steady happiness is just something that takes practice.  Perhaps you have to accept yourself before you can be consistently happy.  Or perhaps it is just not a feeling that comes easily at certain times of your life.