Vie-Carpenter: bringing back bliss

As members of the LGBT community we’re expected to be happy. We are gay after all – our sexuality defined in the dictionary by a word that means “happy.”

But it’s not a fair assessment. It seems we lose that ease of connection to bliss when we get older, and are often anything but perpetually happy.

When we were young we would seek these moments out. Jumping in puddles, playing with dolls, climbing trees, climbing anything – it was about whatever gave you pleasure. And there were so many things that gave you that feeling of bliss.

These moments are often fleeting. If you don’t pay attention to them as they are happening, the moment is over and you missed your opportunity. But, if you do pay attention, you’ll begin to notice that these moments come along all of the time. Open your heart to them and you’ll be amazed at how many moments there are.

Lately, I began noticing people all around me griping about everything. The reality is people have always done it, I just never noticed before. It’s the way that we communicate. We talk about what’s wrong instead of what’s right. We stop noticing the things that are right about our lives. With some it’s almost a game of one-upmanship. If you express displeasure, he or she is going to respond with something even more tragic.

When we stop seeing the places in our lives where everything is going right, we live a life of dissatisfaction. Why would we choose this you might ask? Because we’re crazy; we’ve conditioned ourselves to believe that somehow we’re not supposed to get what we want. It’s the idea of waiting for the other shoe to drop, the idea that bad things happen in threes, so we ignore the last three good things looking for the next bad one.

I was sitting down to write a different column when I remembered a moment, from the past weekend, of pure bliss. I experienced many moments of pure bliss this weekend. I was radiating so much joy that I had to cry in order to release it. I couldn’t stop crying for 45 minutes. I finally got to have an experience that I had been waiting 15 years to have and when it happened I was, well, blissful.

I am grateful to say, I spend a lot more time experiencing moments of bliss these days. It began when I gave myself permission to have them. If you think back to the really blissful moments in your childhood and youth, you will remember moments when you had the freedom to just be. You were simply happy to be right there doing whatever you were doing.

There have been songs throughout time, sung by children and young adults, about not wanting to grow up. It just doesn’t seem to be fun, so why would you want to do it? I decided a long time ago that pleasure was my goal and bliss is my reward. I believe in asking for what you want and then giving yourself the permission to have it. I guess I never stopped being a kid.

I do not believe in taking what is not yours or getting what you want to the detriment of others. Of course this is not bliss, it is greed. The reason adults say youth is wasted on the young is because we don’t know how good we have it when we have nothing to worry about. We know this is not true. Children worry all the time. They worry about their childhood things. However, they do not allow worry to be the only thing that they experience. In fact, they mostly worry about having fun. If they think what they’re doing is wrong, the anticipation of when it’s going to happen again is even greater.

So wake up dear friends. Look around you, pay attention. It is important to remain present in our lives. They go by quickly and if we don’t savor every moment of bliss offered to us, we will miss them.