‘Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word ‘happy’ would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness.’ Carl Jung

I think I could write a story about my life

With a tongue-in-cheek name like ‘The Measuring Spoon of Life’

It would be about a little girl who would carefully measure her happiness by how many nights a week her favourite cousins could sleep over

She would use teaspoons and tablespoons to represent her happiness

When she was a teenager, she learned to measure happiness in dimes and grams

She would use scales and dime bags to symbolize her happiness

As she grew into a young adult, her happiness amounted to how many days in a row she got to spend with her love

For that she used cell phone pictures depicting laughter and text messages filled with flirting

Then when she hit her late 20s, she would measure her happiness by how long she could remain in public without having a panic attack

She would use mood journals and diaries to interpret her happiness

Later in her mid 30s, her happiness was measured by milligrams, and how many Ativan’s she’d had to take

Pill bottles and prescriptions were the perfect illustrations of how much happiness she’d been prescribed

Throughout the story the landscape changed

The young girl grew into a teenager and then an adult

But her objective in life remained the same

The pursuit of happiness

She learned very early on

That happiness only came in small doses

And because of that, it should be treasured dearly

She would think to herself

Maybe it’s so people don’t overdose on happiness

It’s far too sacred to be given an abundance of

In the story of the young girl, she learned early on

That happiness is not going to stick around forever

So she learned to cherish the nights with cousins, the recklessness found in the dimes and grams of youth, the lucky days spent with lovers, the little successes during rough patches

Like all great stories

It comes with a life lesson

Using the girl who measured happiness with spoons as an example

The story warns that if she had so much as blinked her eyes

She might have missed one of the small measured capsules that happiness would hide in

But that little girl was smart

And she knew that one day she might need a dose of her treasured happiness

She knew it would help her

To get through all the hard times that were waiting up ahead

The story ends with that little girl as an old woman now

Suffering through pain of illness, loss and disease

She looks so old and sad

She opens up a memory box

And empties it all onto the bed beside her

Out comes the spoons, the scales, the pictures, the journals, the diaries, the prescriptions

The old woman looks at her life laid in front of her

Instruments of measured happiness

And she’s so grateful

That she held onto all of those small doses of happiness

She thinks to herself

How much she needed to see it, to feel it all over again

She smiles for the first time in a long while

She can’t even count how many times

Those small doses of happiness that she’d held onto

Saved her life

Maybe a thousand times already

And once more