My illusive by-product philosophy

I was having a conversation with a kid the other day, and in one of those semi-profound and inexplicable verbal landslides I said, with very little thought, that all of the best things are always by-products...that happiness, as illusive as it might sometimes be, is a by-product. She looked at me like I just said the dumbest thing ever. I paused to wonder if I had, but then I quickly recovered. It is a by-product and I'm glad that notion found it's way out of the caverns of my mind and into the open air. A little more explaining made it clearer to both of us and I was happy I said it.

See....a by-product, right there. Happiness right on the heels of a random statement.

You can plot your journey to success or happiness or wealth or whatever the hell it is you’re looking for, but if you’re too focused on the end result, you’re going to miss everything good going on around you. All of the things that intersect and combine to make us feel this great big, hard to grasp and define thing called happiness are too often the things that we overlook.

Friends make us happy, so have some good ones...

Activity and adventure makes us happy, so get busy...

Purpose makes us feel happy, so find some...

It's a pretty easy recipe actually. And recipe might just be the best analogy. You can't get a pizza without making it. Sure, you can dial a number and someone will deliver it, but there was somebody a few steps earlier in the cycle that was making it. See, happiness isn't an innate, fell from the sky thing. It has to be slapped together with ingredients. In this case perhaps even the pizza reference is apt. In today's society we can pick up the phone, or log on, and have almost anything instantly...we're shooting for the by-product straight away. We get on a plane and BLAM, we're in Hawaii...we send a text to a "list" on our cell phone and BLAM all fifty of our friends know where we're headed Friday night...we make one phone call and BLAM we have a pizza...see what I mean, straight to the by-product.

I've been thinking about that conversation a lot since it happened and it seems synchronicitous that it occurred when it did. We struggle with right place, right time type notions on a constant basis...I'm sure it's that stage of our lives...and sometimes we forget that it's the ingredients that make the pizza great, not it's accessibility. Happiness is a by-product of a lot of different things. It's the trip as a whole -- who you were with, what you did, how much fun you had -- not the destination.

I like it when I say smart $@#% without even trying. Makes me wonder sometimes if I'm not smarter than I realize...but then I go and say something ridiculous and all is right with the world again.