Happiness, Joy and Love

When I was asked to prospectively name my year, 2017, with three words, I decided: Happiness, Joy and Love.

There is a difference between happiness and joy, to quote the author of The Catcher in the Rye, JD Salinger, “The fact is always obvious much too late, but the most singular difference between happiness and joy is that happiness is a solid and joy a liquid.”

I wish that 2017 would be the best year we have ever had. That we would find happiness, that we would find happiness in such a profound way, we would literally bask by it day after day after day; we would take it everywhere we go, we would speak of it minute after minute after minute because it a thing that is tangible, that is obvious, that is solid; that our happiness would bring contentment, contentment that does not just mean we are fine with what we have but that we are in absolute love with what we have and we can hardly imagine anything else but.

That we would find joy; that we would find the kind of joy that a child finds on the day he sees a colourful kite flying past for the first time – that this joy we find would intoxicate us, free us up, unbox us, unshackle us. The way the little boy chasing this kite laughs and follows and follows and laughs and is absolutely, irreverently beautiful chasing what is joy. I want to be the child chasing the kite. I want joy like the badly produced nollywood movies where the guy has been suffering all his life and finally gets a good job and 30 seconds later new clothes and 30 seconds later a car and 30 seconds later a mansion and 30 seconds later the girl of his dreams, the sultan of his heart sauntering by like a Christmas chicken on Christmas eve, still very unaware of tomorrow’s fate.

I wish we find love. Not love like Jane Austen novels, the love that matters. The one that makes us feel, makes us understand, makes us. Love that would help us empathize with people in bad places. I wish for the kind of love that trumps hate at every single competition, over and over and over. That type that would make us see that other people, even though ideologically different, feel things too, just like us. The love that would make us understand that our differences are but mere patterns that beautify our paths.

Happy New Year!!!