by Charlene Iannella

Created on: January 22, 2011

My almost two year old daughter runs around saying happy on repeat most days, saying it with such abandon and strength that I’m starting to believe she knows more about the word than I do.  Of course, why wouldn’t she?  She’s a baby whose life is happy because it is so new, so young and so insulated from all the scars that adults carry around after experiencing life.  But are those the only reasons?  Is there something in the innocence of a child that allows them to accept happy in ways that adults forget or block out?  When she runs around saying that word, seemingly filled with the magic of it, is it because she knows happy in a way that only children can?  It is as if we mistakenly flip a switch somewhere inside adulthood and turn off the rapturous switch, the one that lets our hearts know no bounds on happy.  We all start out as she is, running around, blindly believing that this concept, happy, is ours and will come as easily as breathing does in life.  Then something happens.  Breathing becomes a bit harder than we first thought.

When I was about a decade older than my daughter is now, I remember being so fascinated with Zelda Fitzgerald & F. Scott Fitzgerald.  But most especially, Zelda, for her great passion for love and life that came off everything she wrote and her ability to so completely inspire the art of one massively talented man.  My favorite quote has always been, “I don’t want to live, I want to love first and live incidentally.”  But Zelda, for seeming to contain the secrets to such raptures, had a very tempestuous life.  She had a mental breakdown, was diagnosed as a schizophrenic, bi-polar, obsessive compulsive, and is known more for all of that then for her intensity for living.  So through Zelda runs the same childlike thread, where happy, while not as simple, was at all times an uncompromising essential.  What I loved about Zelda, a good forty years after her death, was how much her words made me believe in love and happy.  I love how she bravely stated that "not even poets could measure how much the heart could hold".  Should I believe less because she had a mental illness that set her back in many ways to a more innocent time in her life or should that make me believe her more?

Reader, at this point, I may have lost you.  This is an essay about happy and my two best sources are my twenty-one month old daughter

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