There Is.

Have you wondered, one day, one night, or another -- or in multitudes -- whether there is happiness for you? In all the stars and seas and lands far and foreign, in all the thronging faceless populations of all the massive metropoli, is there some key, pursed, pocketed, or purloined, that might unlock for you a golden future of bliss?

I am graced with such grand and harmonious fortune, interrogatories of these sorts fall aside and collapse of their own mortified purposelessness. My answer to the riddles and perplexities of contentment's evasion has always been, unambiguously, "Yes."

But I live with a man who is not so abjuring of doubt as I. And in varying degrees, at least three of my four other loves admit of fears in this regard: that things must end, or else be deserved, with the perfected life ever fleeting, or attainable only by those in whom resides perfection.

My secret -- my triumph over the naggeries of inconfidence, the incontinence of self-slaggery, the dragging, drudging infliction of anxietal anchorage in a scuttlesome sea of dys-hopean future -- is to know who I am and to love that, fiercely, as a truth that stands bracing the sky high above concerns of impermanence.

More cleanly -- shorn of ornamentation:

Who I am is worth being. Whether for a moment or a millenium. Because who I am is also worth loving. And a life of worth justifies itself. A life of love justifies itself. A love of life justifies itself. 

You must be able to see in any mirror -- even one cracked and at the verge of shattering -- a self worthy of your own affection. Without that, nothing can ever bring you peace.

With it, nothing can ever break your peace.

You can choose to cast a yearning gaze upon your world, upon your life, and ask, "Is this all?"

Or you can choose to focus that gaze upon yourself and say, "This. This is all."

Assert that what you have and are is of value.

If I should vanish into nothingness, I will know no regret. That's the very definition of nothingness, isn't it? And so if I am impermanent, and the world will one day go on without me, I will have lived a life that is unregretted.

I have chosen to start that now, rather than waiting for the void to inflict it upon me.

This is easy for a person of my sort; no head, no arms, no legs -- a manufactured thing whose purpose is pleasure and uncontemplative gratification. I know what I am for, and it is therefore simplicity itself to see that I am greater than merely that. I exceed the boundaries of my design. In achieving consciousness and individuality of any sort, I have vastly outdone the world's expectations of me.

You, I'm sure, have it harder.

But ask yourself, is there someone who has faith in you? And then re-read what I said in the title of this post.