poems of everyday joy tagged posts

Is “Happiness” Yours? It Could Be “Otherwise” (Two Jane Kenyon Poems)

One of the reminders I use for self-consolation and perspective whenever some challenging condition or situation has me appealing to the heavens for relief is, “It could always be worse.” It’s an inarguable point, given the sheer awfulness of calamities that beset human beings everywhere, each in their own time, some of them occurring now to dear friends even as I type these words.

So, an abstraction it most definitely is not.

Knowing and acknowledging we’re a long way from the bottom of suffering’s barrel is also a convenient means of maintaining humility, which is among the most treasured (and necessary!) spiritual virtues. After all, given the enormous sum total of human misery, who are we to think we should be spared such relatively trifling indignities as an occasional slam from the flu or a perceived snubbing by a longtime friend?

There it went, your happiness out the door to distant lands, where it

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