What Makes me Happy?

The following was written on April 30th 2002 for a college creative writing class.

Begin: Recently, I went to Mt. Waterman and Twin Peaks in the Mountains above Los Angeles in the Angeles National Forest. It took me back to being a boy with my parents still in their 30s and just how great is was to hike those mountains with them and my friends and even once in a while camp, sled or ski there too. Last week I took my 28 year old son there. Even though we spent time on Hollywood blvd and the sunset strip and went 4 wheeling in our old 1989 Toyota 4runner on the edge of Big Bear, his favorite part of the trip was walking the beautiful old trails there with my stories of memories of my parents and friends there in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

My father died when my son was about 11 years old and the shock of my father's death gave my son asthma at that age suddenly which he still has. In 2001 my mother had to be institutionalized with Senile dementia because she almost burnt down her home and sat praying for the fire to stop instead of putting out the fire she had caused herself.

So my sharing stories with my son of my parents and I all being fairly young and still healthy and alive was an incredible joy that I had thought forever gone until my son and I walked these trails once again.

Traveling all over the world and meeting interesting people has always been fun for me. Girlfriends and then wives brought their share of joy and pain. However, I soon found out in life that joy eventually turned to incredible pain whether it lasted for one day, one week one year or 15 years. It seems the other side of joy is always great pain. In other words "no pain no gain". So it appears to be true that whenever one experiences incredible joy they must also be prepared for the other side which is incredible sadness and the pain when it comes. One can pretend that happiness will be forever. But at least on earth nothing is forever unless it is the earth itself. And I'm not so sure about the permanence of earth.

Family has always brought me great reward and great peace. Whether it was my parents, my cousins or my grandparents or later my wives and children I always felt very rewarded. I did not always believe I would survive breakups with either girlfriends or wives when they occurred but generally somehow things always became eventually survivable somehow, some way.

After I was 26 when my son was born my children became my primary source of joy. As I held my first son in my arms after my wife and I delivered him alone by ourselves I realized what all the intensity and dating and craziness of the 1960s and 1970s had all been about. It brought a whole new joy that I had never experienced before. My son and I bonded from birth. This became very important when 3 years later his mother and I divorced. She gave me full custody of our son. I was 29 and she was only 26 at the time we divorced. Looking back it seems we were too young to be married let alone to be getting divorced but that was then and this is now.

More than anything else, fatherhood made me accept my responsibilities as a man more powerfully than any other factor. This brought powerful joy, pride and pain.

Some people speak of their happiness coming from their careers. This has never been true for me. I have become fairly cynical about careers. I think this is because I am a very free and independent thinker like my father before me. I tend to tell people what I think and this isn't very useful in most careers. So I have found that being an entrepreneur worked best for me after struggling through other options in my 20s. So through trial and error I learned that my independent nature is best suited to creating and running businesses.