Creating Happiness

This is a story a bit different to my others about scissors. I am not going to rehash how I make clothes or use them for protection or tools. No! These scissors are mystical. They are used to limiting happiness, not to promote it.

We always create our own happiness, even when pushed into it, we make the choice to either enjoy, or tolerate it. Happiness means something different to each and every person on this planet. Sometimes we seek it out, sometimes it seeks us out. I could take a pair of scissors and just start cutting to see where it leads. I could snip at the edges of old furniture until there was nothing left, because that is what our bodies are, a piece of furniture. We care for it as best we can, until there is nothing left.

Creating happiness? Now there’s a job. There are many things we do to make us happy, but true soul deep happiness is hard to come by.

We can dine with friends or watch a movie with family and be happy. We can be creative and be happy, but I enjoy the small things. I love to create things, from the practical—once I sliced into a plastic garbage bag with a pair of scissors and made myself a raincoat—to the impractical—I made a paper dress, using those same scissors, for a fancy dress party—but for all the things those scissors could do, have done, they could not create lasting happiness, and lasting happiness is what I wanted.

Happiness is a state of being… of being happy in your own skin. It is achieved by crafting a life that brings you joy on a moment-to-moment basis.

For me, happiness is being alone with my thoughts, staring out my window to my world, that each year, brings new scenery. One year, I looked out just as a large stag looked in. Another year, I watched a two-meter tiger snake explore the front yard for almost an hour, and last year, I looked out and saw snow.

The point is, we frame our happiness, like threading our lives through a loom in an effort to capture and contain it within each weave. We are the loom. We weave our lives according to the way family, friends and society expect, and rarely do we take the time to weave a life we choose. A life that is totally ours.

True happiness is like a frightened doe. If you make a sudden move, it will scamper away and hide, we humans make a lot of sudden moves. And those mystical scissors cut out the things they think we are not ready for, or cannot handle.

In looking out my window, I know if I make a sudden move, I will frighten away whatever is on the other side. That is where my many years of honing my solitary thoughts has paid off. I learned not to react when something looked back at me, when I am at home that is… unless there’s a peeping Tom, then that sucker’s going down… but I digress…

I have many things that make me happy, that those mystical scissors trim off for me to show the world. I have a wonderful partner, loving cats, and the wild kingdom outside my windows—One year we watched a Kookaburra swoop down over the backyard lake, snatch a snake from the water and fly away with it—So yeah, wild kingdom, but those mystical scissors? They only give me enough rope to write stories, poetry, olde English tales, sing the odd song and make a new dress, but I’m a Jack of all trades, and master of none. Though I do have a certificate that say’s I am a Master of Letters.

My greatest fear has always been, “What if I’m not good enough?”

I was told for a long time that I wasn’t, and sometimes wonder if after all those years of being told that, if I truly believed it? What if the things I have to offer are substandard? What if my writing, the thing I love to do most, is pure crap, and my ego is only being propped up by family and friends? It's a constant battle.

I fight through moments like that, but they are moments and while the things family and friends say make me feel happy, they are not the things that make me a happy person. Only I can do that. So, what is at the centre of my being that makes, creates, happiness in me? I can tell you in one word, pain.

Tearing away from the scissors edge, and taking over the job of crafting myself, was painful, but if not for that pain, I couldn’t know happiness. If not for that pain, I couldn’t know myself.

No-one likes pain, but it is necessary if we are to be healthy, happy individuals in control of our own lives. To tear away from those mystical scissors that had been holding me back since my birth, snipping along pathways here and there. Paths I wouldn’t have taken if only I had known, but those old scissors constantly cut away at my soul, at the essence that was me.

Those scissors led me to expect knowledge of self was an exterior process. They never gave me a moments rest to look inwards.

There has been a lot of pain in my life, both mental and physical, but when I stopped. When I dropped those scissors. When I became quiet, that’s when I found myself. That’s when I found my happiness.

There was/is music in the air all around me. I see it, hear it, feel it, but no-one else can, because it is my happiness. There’s colour in my world too. Bright fun colours and they are everywhere.

Even in the darkest of times, I find a way to keep those mystical scissors from creating more damage, by allowing my colours to shine through. They are my guiding light back to myself when I become lost to a sea, tossing and turning in the pit of my stomach, carrying all my pains and hurts in its flow. My colour throws me a rainbow, and I take hold as it pulls me from that ocean of pain.

It was in that ocean that I first saw what those scissors were hiding. I had a gift they had kept hidden from me. I could use the gift, and had, but those mystical scissors would carve a new path before I could really examine it. My gift, you see, is colour. I see in colour. I remember in colour. I was gifted with Colour Synesthesia. I had it all my life but didn’t know what it was, or how to access it on command.

I knew I was different from most, thought differently than most, but it wasn’t until all the colour had been stripped from my world, when I saw my truth hidden beneath the scissor’s blades. Those scissors had been hit so hard; they had been knocked asunder. They were twitching, snipping and still trying to slice into my soul.

“Pick us up,” they would whisper, but I learned to ignore them, and I control them now.

I have tossed those scissors into my lake of pain and weighted them beneath my past sorrows.

I had suffered a traumatic brain injury, and that smack to my head opened up a hidden world of colour in a spectacular way. My dreams became like Dorothy landing in Oz, opening that door into colour with munchkins breaking into song.

The day the colour surrounded me, I pushed down hard on those scissors squirming beneath my inner self, as they constantly tried to take back control of a soul that wasn’t theirs to begin with. I had to quell their voices. For more than twenty-years I have seen colour everywhere and with all the talents I have, it is the colours I see that are at the centre of my being. They are the creators of my happiness.

If Colour Synesthesia is the gift I have had since I was born, being the one thing that brought me happiness in my solitude, then like Dorothy, I’ve always had my happiness with me, I was just looking for it in the wrong places.

I am the project I have been crafting for fifty plus years, and there was nothing I could create with my hands or voice that could explain how unique my happiness was.

I am me. I know that now, and I do not belong to anyone or anything. I certainly do not belong to a pair of mystical scissors who set up home in my soul to make my life a misery.

It has always been me. I have been crafting my pains, my loves, and my losses into something new, into someone aware, and even though those old scissors remain, the only thing waiting in my silence are the tools I need to get back to creating me.