aiwendel asked me that at the Calling last night. It's odd; I've always known that I had an unusually strong tendency to answer ‘How are you?’ with an actual description of how I was, rather than with the ISO standard ‘Oh, fine, fine’ that satisfies the demands of small talk with minimal effort. But on being asked ‘Are you happy?’, which should in theory be practically the same question, I actually found myself stopping and thinking, and giving a very different answer. It seems my answers to ‘How are you?’ haven't been nearly as truthful as I'd thought.

And (after thinking about it a bit) no, I'm not happy. But on the other hand, neither am I unhappy. I'm sort of in-between, balanced between lots of things. There are an enormous number of things I want; there's no way I can possibly have all of them (often simply because there's not enough time in the day), and just to add confusion, some of them I simultaneously want and don't want. So every time I get some of one thing I want, it's necessarily balanced by losing (the possibility of) some of something else I want. Hence, it's been a long time since anything made me feel genuinely happy without simultaneously making me feel sad for another reason. On the plus side, it's also been a long time since anything made me feel genuinely upset without also having a bright side to look on.

It's difficult to imagine a way in which this might change in the foreseeable future. I suppose something would have to come along which would make me so happy that it outweighed the myriad little disappointments it would inevitably cause in other areas. This would take quite some doing, I suspect…

It was an excellent question to be asked, though. I urge anyone else who hasn't happened to give it much thought recently to do so.