Jambalaya

Once upon a time a friend asked me, "are you happy?" I was first taken aback and not sure how to answer. My instincts told me to answer both "yes" and "no" at the same time.

I think happiness is not binary, that is, its not a yes or no feeling. I think happiness is like a bowl of jambalaya. I choose jambalaya for this analogy because its fun to say (I've been a vegetarian for the past 5 or so years so a more appropriate food analogy would be my tempeh/brown rice/stir fry dish, but its not as fun to say). What I mean is, I think that at any given moment we have happiness, sadness, anger, peace, joy, love, hate, etc. all mixed up together in our bowl (like a bowl of jambalaya). There are things in the bowl we don't like, but have to deal with. There are some things in the bowl that we know we like too. There is some stuff in the bowl that we're not quite sure how to identify. Something in the bowl might even make us a bit queasy in the stomach. But that is life, and we eat it up and overall, it tastes pretty good.

Sometimes we don't see the happiness in there because its buried under some other stuff. That is when we have to dig a bit deeper to find it.
(I couldn't find a picture of jambalaya on my computer, so I put this one up. Its nice, isn't it?)