An Auspicious Visitation

We were sitting out in the garage the other evening watching and listening to the rain. The sun had just set. There was still a little bit of light lingering in the sky, just enough that in the garage you could still make out the shapes of most things, but the color had been drained from everything, leaving only shades of gray. Sand was there, of course, as was Howie curled up contentedly by her chair.

Howie sat up suddenly, ears pricked, and he rose to slowly move toward my chair, his sniffing nose leading the way. When I looked down to see what he was up to, sitting next to me was the toad you see in the picture above. He was about the size of a baseball, and seemed perfectly content to be sitting at my side.Who knows how long he had been there, and what he may have heard of our conversation.

I doubt the rain would have bothered him, but the cold might have driven him to look for someplace warmer. Aside from a curiosity, Howie wasn't bothered by Toad's presence. I didn't want Toad to get trapped when we closed the garage door for the night, so I had Sand pick him up and take him out by the pond in the front yard where we also took photos of him for the archives.

I believe this to be a visitation by the Toad of Happiness. Economic realities being what they are, we can no longer afford the more expensive Bluebird of Happiness. There are some of the feathery harbingers of good tidings in and around our neighborhood, however these are mostly in the upscale areas to our south, or to the occasional home in our neighborhood owned by an elderly couple who had paid off their mortgage before the housing slump. Most of us, however, are now being visited by the amphibious  messenger.

It's cool though. The Toads require less maintenance, and frankly they are better listeners. And happiness, after all, does not depend on how much money you spend on it. Who can put a price on sitting in the garage listening to the rain with your wife, dog and your very own Toad of Happiness? In California, no less.

Life doesn't get much better. I'm just saying.

The Blogging Experience Thus Far

Self Portrait

I am reasonably pleased with the direction my blog has taken since its inception. It has become a forum for fine art and spirited intellectual intercourse. Very highbrow, if you know what I mean. It makes me happy.

Or does it?

I mean, what is happiness? Happy is one of those words that everybody uses, and everybody knows pretty much what they mean by it, but for which there is little agreement about what it is. Good is like that too. And truth. In fact, after Jesus had been arrested and was being questioned by Pilate, he said his purpose was to talk about the truth. Pilate rolled his eyes and said what is truth?  Interestingly, at that point Pilate thought Jesus had done nothing wrong and was going to release him, probably because opinions about truth were like left feet -- everybody had one, and if you didn't, who cared anyway? Those were harsh times, and Pilate was doing fine with his own version of the truth, had worked his way up to being the Prefect of the Roman province of Judea,  and was happy.

Or was he?

Pilate had money, power and a job, but was he happy? I have a blog and lots of time, but am I happy?

Broadly speaking (and I mean really broadly) there are two main camps in the happiness debate. One camp says happiness is knowing the truth about stuff, and the other camp says happiness is about pleasure, and the more the merrier. Religious people fall into the first group. They think they know what the truth is, and therefore they are happy. Thomas Aquinas says that true happiness is possessing a perfect knowledge of God, and while we can begin to be happy here and now, we will only be truly happy after death, i.e. in heaven. I've known people who seemed that they would only be happy if I was dead, so this concept of happiness seems to fit at least some of my experience.

The other group says that happiness is all a numbers game where happiness is the sum of pleasures, and the more the merrier.  "Quality of pleasure being equal, push-pin is as good as poetry," is the way one advocate of this group puts it, "push-pin" being a child's game akin to tiddlywinks. Some would refine that a bit by saying the quality of the pleasure has at least some bearing on the matter. "It is better", Stuart Mills urges, "to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied." There is no denying that I have known more than a few people who are perfectly happy being satisfied pigs, so this concept of happiness also fits some of my experience.

I think that in the future when people have a chance to study my blogs, to see the beauty of the art, to see the power of the prose, they will say wow, he's better off dead. And so yes, inspired by Aquinas, I believe that I can confidently say that my blog makes me happy.

Bonum perfectum quod totaliter quietat appetitum. I'm just saying.