Here's How to Be Happy

Here’s how to hand over your phone and your car keys to some stranger named Francois because you’ve accepted the conclusion which many alcoholics and drug addicts have come to accept at some point in their lives: you cannot control yourself. 

Here’s how to wake up at 4 AM and walk down a dark snowy mountain path into a a dim meditation hall with about 40 fellow adult runaways and sit on the floor and cross your legs and just become aware of your breath. 

Here’s how to practice Noble Silence, 10 days of zero communication with any human other than yourself, down to even laughter or facial gestures, which actually isn’t very hard for you since that’s your default way of being around strangers anyway. 

Here’s how to do absolutely nothing, all day, for about a week, until you decide you can’t take it any more and sneak your notebook out of your bag and start scribbling deranged messages to yourself on white pages in the bathroom — which is definitely breaking the rules, but you want to do it so bad that you don’t even care. 

And here’s what you’ve been looking for all along:

The realization that writing like this is all you’ve ever wanted anyways, that you’re good at it and it’s not crazy to believe that you could even some day make money doing it, with time and discipline and care…

But it is crazy that you haven’t told your girlfriend or your parents or anyone on Earth that you quit your job weeks ago because you’d rather sit at home and collect unemployment writing short stories for an audience that doesn’t exist and maybe never will. 

You can explain it all, to them and to anyone because you’re good at explaining things because that is what a writer does, and that is what you are. Except right now you are on the bathroom floor of a dorm-house on a freezing mountain in Idaho. I have got to get out of here.