I hope this is not my legacy

It’s late on Christmas day and I’ve just put in a new Explosions in the Sky CD and am consequently fairly inspired to write something. I am very calm today, which is unusual, I think maybe I am relaxed because I don’t feel obligated to learn anything or achieve anything on Dec. 25th. Normally I am on such a quest for self-improvement that I end up feeling bad for doing things like relaxing and watching TV.

Now I am perfectly aware that on a rational level, at any given point in time, if someone is doing what they want to do then all is well. In the evening, if I want to spend hours on online forums then fine, right? The problem is that the thing which one ends up doing quite happily, often isn’t the thing which they would do given the choice of all things. Hence it is possible to go through a period of time being completely content, accumulating the whole time a degree of “error” (the difference between your actual level of happiness and the maximum possible level). I think it is only when you stop and step back to think about what you could have been doing in that time period that you see the error which I am talking about. My “New Years Resolution” is going to be to spend as much time as possible doing the things I really want to do.

Right now I am actually very content listening to Tori Amos (yes it took me 40 minutes to write up to this point far) and thinking about things, and I can’t actually think of anything I would rather be doing (though I suppose I would prefer to be doing this but on the moon), so I would say happiness is pretty much up there at the top of the scale.