The moral of the story is...

He's down, one more and he's out...

...if you’re a lonesome cowboy just come to town beware strange women bearing gifts, particularly beautiful women bearing intoxicating gifts.  You’ll lose a lot more than your spurs.

The subject of the year is happiness, and happiness is a decidedly slippery subject to set into words.  Why?  Because where there are several words that name various levels and degrees of happiness there really are not many, if any, word symbols dedicated to defining the dynamic internal relationships which produce the perception of such states of being. 

On reflection I’ve realized this isn’t the first time I’ve bounced off this subject.  In the story “Pilgrim” my heroine SQ engages with this thought at a pivotal point in her quest of self realization.

For two days she floated and did little, the mid point of the voyage passed into the wake.  The mate had been right, a sedative was called for.  The narcotic had broken the tension she’d been building for days with her thoughts.  Things became distant, academic.  What was left to explore?  Her answer came at dinner, overheard between the purser and the mate, a discussion of philosophy and languages of the world.  The purser was holding forth that no language of the world contained as many words to describe happiness as it did shades of the opposite, the mate was trying to prove him wrong using the language of the Polynesian peoples for an example.  He might have been correct, but he couldn’t prove it.

Sundown was drifting with their debate, and taking her own tack with it.  It was quite a thought, really.  Words represent the things known to the people who speak them, the subtleties of their use the structures of thought.  If the purser was correct, as she was prone to suspect, then most of mankind truly labored against a curse of monumental proportions: the very language that set him apart from the animals biased his existence to the darkness.  On the other hand the mate was a good man, she’d seen that in the few minutes she’d suffered that he handle her giving relief from herself, there was no reason to doubt what he said, either.  He’d traveled the world and she suspected him of wisdom beyond what showed day to day.  The people of the south seas were rumored to have a happiness uncorrupted by what most called civilization, which allowed the curse was not native to all of mankind, it could be broken.

Happiness, joy, ecstasy, the English language assumes all of these things are primal beyond any precise or specific definition, states of life that might be experienced but never really understood.  In other words, essentially accidents or gifts of fate.  But if accidents they be then how is it that what is undefined and indefinable has generated multiple names but no understanding of the differences between them by which to pick the most appropriate name to describe such a moment?

No, the fact that there exists more than one word naming a consummately positive state of being is ample evidence for me to assume there must be some degree of understanding at some level or another of the human condition.  Were it not so then one name would suffice.  A path to understanding the things these words name is likely hidden between these words, and it is that path I propose to follow as an initial exploration to build a set of range markers and references. 

Just what is the difference between happiness and joy and ecstasy?  Catch you later world, I’ve got some serious thinking to do.