I have a friend who doesn't like sweets. Every time I offer him sweets, candies, etc., he refuses, saying he doesn't like sweet things. When asked why, he just casually says that he ate too much candy when he was a child, and now he doesn't like it anymore. Indeed, he loved candy a lot when he was young; he always had candy in his mouth when he could remember. Later, as expected, he got cavities and toothaches. As he grew a bit older, he remembered the pain that cavities brought, and the empty teeth kept reminding him not to eat sweets. He got used to it and just felt that sweet things were unnecessary. This is similar to happiness in our lives. I remember a classic scene in Rick and Morty where only a few powerful beings fear happiness; happiness cannot last.
When you experience the arrival of happiness and then lose it, you will constantly doubt the reality of happiness. When happiness comes again, you will only feel like it is an illusory bubble. This is why accepting happiness requires more courage than accepting pain. Later, I slowly accepted the difficult future that I found hard to accept. I wondered if these ordinary days in life gradually wore away our ideals, enthusiasm, and fighting spirit, ultimately throwing away our expectations for the future into the trash can, into the incinerator. Every time I write, it's mostly because I can't hold back my emotions and need to express them. It feels like this way, I can tell the words I haven't spoken to the people I want to talk to, those unseen people, can you know this? Now I want to ask my future self a year from now, have you started working? Do you find the repetitive work annoying? I want to ask my future self three years from now, have you returned to your hometown? Have you bought your own car? Are you still playing Sky?
Actually, I am not weak at all. That night I told you I cried, and it wasn't heart-wrenching at all... Later, you told me that you found my crying very inexplicable and absurd. From that moment on, I knew you had changed from an indispensable person in my heart to a dispensable one. I just still miss the old days, but I wouldn't want to go back to them. "If life were only as it was at first sight." Of course, later I feared happiness and lost a lot, such as my perception of time, the joy of being self-sufficient, and that sense of satisfaction that I could once easily feel. Happiness is like a double-edged sword; the more you desire it, the more you fear losing it. So, I simply closed myself off, pretending not to need it. Time quietly slips through my fingers, but there is no longer that sense of "this moment is eternity." Life has become mechanical, like a pre-set program, repeating the same actions but lacking the participation of the soul. Once, a fallen leaf, a ray of sunshine, a casual word could make me feel the beauty of the world. But now, these small joys seem to be isolated by an invisible barrier. I began to doubt whether I was too greedy, wanting too much, which made happiness feel so distant. But later I understood that happiness has never been something unattainable; it is whether we are willing to open our hearts to accept it. Perhaps fearing happiness is because of the fear of loss, the pain of falling from a height. But life is inherently unpredictable; no one can always stand at the peak, and no one will always be at the bottom. Rather than rejecting happiness out of fear of loss, it is better to learn to cherish it when we have it and to let go when we lose it. After all, happiness is not a state but a choice. I began to try to rediscover those forgotten joys, such as feeling the warmth of the first ray of sunlight on my face when I wake up in the morning; like giving myself a cup of hot tea amidst the busyness, quietly savoring a moment of tranquility; like learning to talk to myself in solitude, listening to the voice within. These small moments may not change everything in life, but they make me feel again that happiness has always been there; it is just whether we are willing to see it. So, I tell myself not to fear happiness anymore. Even if it brings temporary fragility, even if it may disappear one day, at least I have truly possessed it. And this possession is enough to make my life richer. Happiness is neither a sweet cage nor an illusory bubble. When we stop measuring happiness with social standards and instead establish an internal value coordinate system; when we can appreciate the completeness of the changing seasons and experience the vitality of life in cultivation—this kind of happiness, accompanied by clear awareness, may be the ultimate key to breaking the trap's curse. Just as Hesse wrote in "Siddhartha": "Wisdom cannot be expressed in words. The wise try to impart wisdom, but it is always like a fool's dream." The real answer is always in everyone's practical experience. "Happy, and then what, how does love confirm it again?"