The Feeling

There are times - when I am perhaps walking the streets of a great city, or sitting by the ocean, or looking out from a mountain over a valley, or listening to a beautiful song, or looking at an incredible painting, or…well I could go on - when I have the most extraordinary feeling.

It wells up out of nowhere, washes over me from the outside and fills me up from the inside. It is a feeling that things are, essentially and primally, good. A feeling that to live in the world, to walk around it and see and hear and smell and taste touch it, is a good thing. A feeling that happiness is a natural state and remains attainable, that joy lurks around every corner and that it is, most definitely, worth it - it’s worth existing if such a feeling is going to come upon me from time to time. It’s a feeling that there is beauty within me and without me and that everything is, at least at this moment, OK.

This doesn’t happen nearly as often as I’d like: I’d like to walk around every minute of every day feeling like this, but maybe the feeling itself is contingent on being rare. I don’t know.

Sometimes I feel that it’s wrong to feel this way. Because a lot of the time I feel quite the opposite: that the world is a dirty and corrupt place, irredeemable and relentlessly cruel; that my own life is as useless to others as it is to myself. Sometimes I feel sad, sometimes I feel hopeless, sometimes I feel shame grinding my insides to dust.

And maybe, I think, given how nightmarish the world is, how horrific life is for so many people living in it, it’s wrong of me to ever feel that things are good. Because things aren’t good, are they? At least they’re not good in many places for many people. They’re not even close to good. The world is a house of endless misery and feeling good about it seems almost perverse.

And here is where, as a good conscientious writer, is where I tell you my theory as to why it’s actually fine to feel great about things and not worry too much about anything else.

But I don’t want to tell you that theory because I don’t have a theory on it. I don’t know whether it’s right or wrong to feel wonderful about life in the face of so much contrary evidence - or indeed whether it’s right or wrong to feel terrible about life in the face of, let’s be honest, a lot of other contrary evidence - because yes there are undoubtedly some beautiful things surrounding us.

I don’t know. I have no idea what the right way to feel about the world is, and whether I am closer to it when I am euphoric, or when I’m melancholy, or if the correct way to be is carefully neutral. I have no certainties and no recommendations.

All I know is that I can’t help it.

I know that, just as there is no way to prevent myself, some days, from sliding down into despair, equally there’s no way to stop that feeling coming over me. There’s no way of holding back the tide of joy, when I’m looking at the glittering lights or listening to the soaring sounds.

I can’t help myself. And I don’t know what that means, except that to feel that way is to know myself a little more, and that I’m pretty sure you know what I mean.

Love you.