Happiness in Grammar

I do it to myself I think. It isn't entirely my fault. Grammar could have been more thoroughly taught to me, or at least with deeper philosophical underpinnings. I was misled you see, but stray cats know their way home.

I was always taught happiness was a noun. It is a concept, but I think my teachers were rushing. Rushing to convey to us at large that it is a thing that can be described, acted upon and held. One of those intangible nouns like space or Nicaragua; whether in its vastness or vagueness I cannot explicitly touch it, but it still is a thing that exists.

There is a deep reason why I think concepts are not nouns and it comes from a place of desire. When I think of happiness, or strive for it, as a noun I am left with the sorrowful conclusion that all nouns leave me with, impermanence. Happiness is not a person, place, or thing. They will all wither, but happiness is immortal. When I confuse happiness with being a thing, I stand a chance of losing it. When happiness is described to me as a place, I start to feel as happiness is endlessly 'over there.' When happiness is a person, it lasts for 84 years, or 30, or 17 so far, or sadly only 2. There is a happiness with no limitation, that isn't a function of time.

All ideas, at least worthy of doing so, seem to have the ability to outlive their nouns. We still understand Einstein and Marley's ideas, though they have passed. The genius of the pyramids live on in our Louvre and in our skyscrapers, and heaven seems to have lived on despite poor irrigation to Eden. Indeed, what a pity it would be if God was condemned to live in Gaza, or under a Bodhi tree, or alone and apart from us in the mountains where we found him or where He said he would be.

 I have been more comfortable treating happiness as a noun, searching for it and losing it, losing sight of it all the while. But as a concept it has become free and I am in touch with it ever more than before. It's in a warm pillow, but also in a cold pillow. It is in her and it is in me. It is in togetherness and in solitude. It is in everything including distinct opposites, and so there is no room left for sadness. Release happiness from the ground, it has wings while nouns only have feet.

 You may think that if happiness for you is only a concept, only a concept of the mind, in your head, that it too will die with you. But I have a mouth, and fingers, and other ways of setting happiness free so that when I have passed or merely passed from you it will remain in the ether. Every word and glance is an opportunity for you to offer up happiness even when you have no nouns left to give me - this I have noticed, this I have learned. When you are gone, what concepts will you leave me with?

Despite the imposing threat from well-trained linguists in reminding me that even the word concept is a noun, I will not err. I think my quest of the next short while is to see how many concepts I can relinquish of my false sentence of nounship. What other concepts have I tried desperately to make real because I felt that only seeing is believing? I charge myself with doing some intellectual volunteer work: Toothbrush in hand I will scrub clean the oil from the noun tanker that has rendered unusable the wings of my most cherished concepts. Find me on weekends down by the shores of all I have come to know.

When we make concepts into nouns we don't make them more real, despite our underlying desire to make them more accessible in doing so. In our efforts to bring love, happiness, truth, devotion, honour into the here and now, we have robbed them of so many tomorrows. In making God a noun in our lives we condemn him as he condemned Prometheus, forever away from us on a mountaintop, while buried away in texts and mystery.