I don’t wish you happiness

By Pablo Corral Vega

I don’t wish you a happy new year. How could I? Happiness is only a fleeting spark, a joyful moment amid other, humbler moments, no less important for their quietness.

Happiness is a glass of cool water on a hot day, the breeze on your skin, the evening light kissing everything with honey. Happiness is the unexpected meeting with an old friend, gratitude, tenderness, hours shared in the delicious nothingness of simply being alive. One moment of happiness after another, and another, and another, would inevitably lose its shine.

On nights like this we say inshallah: if God, or the Universe, so grants it; if the cosmos allows. To tell you the truth, I fear treacherous misfortune. I fear that wishing you happiness might be an act of arrogance, or of naïveté.

I don’t wish you happiness. No. I wish you vitality: a persistent, insistent, stubborn vitality, vitality in spite of everything. I wish you the alchemist’s magic, the secret knowledge that turns even pain into beauty. I wish you creativity, the playful power to turn clay into answer, into delirium.

I wish you awareness—not abstract or philosophical awareness, but the awareness of presence, the presence of those we love. I wish you tenderness: a proud and resolute tenderness, a tenderness that engages your bones and your entrails, a tenderness that allows you to live what the other feels, with presence and surrender.

I wish you a rose (or a fox) to whom you have granted the right to tame you. Every person has the right—almost the obligation—to live the delicious complicity of love, the danger of losing one’s bearings in order, finally, to find them. I wish you closeness: one soul leaning into another until it yields to the mystery of the other.

I wish you time—plenty of time—time you will not sell to the highest bidder. Time to walk, to breathe, to love, to celebrate. Time alone and time shared. Time to listen to the rhythms of nature and the song of birds, time for wonder.

I wish you the stars, and the mystery of losing yourself in their mystery. However wise or intelligent we may be, it takes only one look at the night sky to grasp the depth of our ignorance.

Life is short, and that is what makes it precious. Life is cruel, senseless, indifferent—but above all, it is short. I wish you the fragrant tumult of knowing yourself alive today, now, in this instant, in this moment that will not return.

Of the future, we humans know nothing. We barely manage to stammer inshallah, hopefully, if the universe allows.