The dichotomy of happiness and yearning is something that one grows used to in age, but is, I believe, one of the trickier swamps to be encountered by the young as they attempt to come alongside the business of adult life. Like all the growing-up swamps, this one is of indeterminate size and shape, and can take a long time to cross.
It begins when you find yourself to be suddenly happy where you are - it might be the circle of friends, the place, the job, or all three (lucky!), and this is usually a sign that you have left school and entered the second block of your life (see last blog).
It is akin to making it to a traffic island in the middle of a busy road in the middle of a busy town; it is satisfying and safe, and for a while it is the right thing to do to stay there. However, the traffic island is not such a secure place to be, as the danger lies in the difficulty of deciding when, why and how to leave it.
All the time that you are happy on the island, you are also yearning to be out in the traffic, risking the ride and making a beeline for nearer or further destinations, with all the bewildering range of routes available to the 21st century young. And so back to danger - this time the danger of not leaving the island, mistakenly seeing the happiness as something that can be secured, held, atrophied in time. There is also the fear of not being able to hold it, and this is the reality of change.
You may have reached the island, but the traffic is still moving: you may be happy in your immediate orbit, but the orbit will change around you, friends will move on, jobs come and go, places subtly shift on their axis. Suddenly the island is in a different stream, it might even be in a stream you don't like, and none of it was your making. Change is the one inevitability in all this - no matter how good or bad things are, they will change whether you like it or not.
Young people torment themselves with the problem of change, which is the faultline which underlies and threatens to destabilize happiness throughout life, but can be terrifying to the young who have usually been sheltered from the worst of it thus far. Inertia is common; determinedly standing stock-still while life flows and eddies round the ankles, and eventually some of the things that were held so dear ebb away towards their new destinations. And so it is easy to be left behind, fiercely protecting an illusion of happiness which is suddenly not there at all.
Then there is the business of yearning, which is the 'feel the fear but do it anyway' mode; the risk-taking roller-coaster which demands that you jump off the island before you get left behind, sacrificing a chunk of happiness time in order to maintain the potential of other happinesses. The potential for rewards is great; the potential for mistakes is similar; witness the statistics on the number of young people who drop out of college or uni in the first year.
It is also scary - and not scary in the sense of practicalities, but deeply scary in terms of the inner rucksack of self that now has to be packed and carried. Parents cannot pack it or shoulder it, and quite rightly young people fiercely don't want them too. Many of the parent/adolescent arguments come down to the rucksack of self. And of course we are all still carrying the rucksacks we started packing at that time.
So there it is: the happiness of being and the yearning for change. Stay and resist and watch it happen, or go and be bold and embrace the random happinesses which make up the mixed bag of life. In the end there is no real choice, is there?
