It was the part of our conversation about happiness that took a wide and unexpected turn into a moment of epiphany.

As if our chat wasn’t already fascinating given the long lapse of time between meetings, at one point we exchanged our own ideas of what makes each of us happy nowadays. I wasn’t expecting an epiphany but that’s what epiphanies do, they just creep up and surprise you when you least expect it.

As we were sharing I discovered our “happy” scenarios were all circumstantial, based almost entirely upon fortunate events and lovely experiences that once happened around us, to us, or were otherwise concocted by us, ultimately producing the experience of happiness.

Lunch ended.

As we hugged and each of us drove back to our jobs, I thought about it.

Us humans seem to put in a lot of effort for some fleeting bliss which, ultimately passes until dependence on the next experience brings us back to happiness.

To be continuously happy requires exposure to things outside ourselves, while being content is taskless; an unavoidable state of peace within ourselves despite the circumstances whatever they are.

While happiness is merely the ! at the end, contentment is the entire sentence before it.

We need not work at writing the sentence because our contentment just lets it fall into place.

Epiphanies are full of wonder and beauty, and exactly what our reunion over lunch had become.

It made me happy.