Haiku 2023–362

a question for you

if I told you I was happy

would you believe me?

— —

An artistic rendering of today’s post generated by a program created by the author.

I struggled to put fingers to keyboard this morning to come up with a haiku. Sensing my dilemma, my wife Jess asked a few well-placed questions to get me unstuck. She spitballed a couple of ideas including one about today being my last day of work for 2023. I reminded her that I’d already written two haiku about going to work this week. She replied that she knew and commented about being somewhat “depressive”…

…and planted a seed that finally sprouted.

So, here I am on the precipice of completing this year-long journey. I post my work to two different sites with two different audiences — Medium and Instagram. Similar to my experiment earlier with Haiku 2023–330, I wonder if I were to give all 362 haiku from this project to an AI or a person, what kind of opinion would they form about me, but more specifically about my state of mind? At the risk of sounding cliche, would the reader find me to be a person whose glass is half empty or half full? Can arguments be made for both? What argument would sway me the most? Is it even a relevant question?

During our discussion regarding the content level of glasses, Jess mentioned a slightly different question — is the glass transparent enough you can tell the status of its contents? That’s an excellent question. I would like to think it is, but the hardest person for anyone to know at times is themselves. So what do I think?

I think I’m a glass that has water in it. In some ways, that’s good enough for me.

I once heard someone say that happiness is not something that you reach, but something you pass through. I could not agree more. I will say that now that I’m closer to happy now that I have content to post, but daylight is literally burning and I must leave the comfy chair and head to work which can be a happy place at times, but generally isn’t. No, I can’t say that I’m “in happy” at the moment, but happiness is nearby and with a few alterations of my course, I can cruise right through the heart of it.