Our dinner conversation about happiness took an unexpected turn into serendipity.

After sharing what makes each of us happiest, I had an epiphany. All our happiest scenarios were circumstantial, based on fortunate events and experiences that either happened around us, to us, or were otherwise created by us to experience and briefly enjoy.

It occurred to me “that’s a lot of work for a moment of fleeting bliss which is ultimately dependent on the next one.”

Being continuously happy requires effort and exposure to things outside ourselves while being content is a still, taskless state of peace within our circumstances whatever they are. Happiness is the ! at the end while contentment is the sentence before it we need not work to write, because we just let it fall into place.

It was at that moment we all discovered that serendipity is both insightful, wondrous, beautiful, and exactly what our dinner conversation that evening had happily become.

Tiny

droplets

falling,

landing,

faster now,

they race

for standing,

driving down

in revving sheets

a bouncing frenzy

each drop competes

but

I

lost

count

and a new river won.

I sat to watch

the cool summer rain

applaud the earth and

to it waved the checkered flag.

I don’t want to know it when I die. I just want to come home from a long day at work, open the door, drop my briefcase for the last time and suddenly everyone I ever loved jumps out from behind the sofa and yells “Surprise!” and all my old dogs run up and lick me like it’s been ME who’s been gone so long.