Vocabulary

I could talk about happiness. I could talk about serotonin and dopamine and how the wrong quantities make happiness seem more distant than the furthest star. I could talk about the kind of things that make people happy, and about seasonal affective disorder. I could talk about the release of endorphins and why smiles are considered beautiful. I could talk about the happiness brought to you by drugs, and about the drugs which prevent you from not being able to see happiness even with a telescope. I could talk about what causes happiness, chemically speaking.

I could talk about all of these things. I have the vocabulary, and the requisite knowledge. But that would be just dancing around the subject. All of this is cerebral, and entirely divorced from the actual emotion of happiness.

To actually try to explain what happiness feels like, rather than to merely talk about it, would be like trying to describe the intrinsic glory of the universe with the vocabulary of a toddler. There are words that people have coined that try - happy, content, joyful, ecstatic - but these dismally fail to create a sense of the actually feeling itself. They are just words, empty, hollow shades of the emotion that they try to pin down.

So I cannot talk about the fragile, bittersweet laughter of someone who doesn't have long to live. Or the simple, complete joy of a mother watching her child take its first steps. Or the childlike wonder of the infant itself. Because my vocabulary is insufficient, and the words just aren't there.