Well...that's it..apparently I'm a fraud. Not in the "I'm gonna take your money" sense, but in the "my personal history wasn't the miserable existence I have been telling myself it was" sense. But maybe you knew that. In fact...I suspect you couldn't have missed it. To me it seems that the whole "negativity bias" thing creates for each of us a blind spot that is only revealed when we attempt to tell our tale and fill in all the available details. When we do that....(when I did that at least) it became blatantly obvious that there was a gaping whole in the middle taking on the precise size, and shape of the heretofore unacknowledged moments of pure happiness. Why is it these things are so hard to notice and appreciate? Is it just me? Or so we all spend nearly 100% of our waking hours time traveling as we flit from past hurts to imagined future hurts in an insane dance trying to tiptoe over the minefield of pain that exists in our lives? Is it also possible that in doing so we miss 100% of the present....the only place where peace and joy actually exists? After all...when we remember joy...don't we experience the pain of it's passing? And when we imagine joy....don't we wallow in frustrated anticipation of its arrival? Could finding lasting happiness be as simple as stepping from the time machine and noticing the joy that can truly only be experienced in the moment? And if we stayed in the moment...would we learn to see pain as the rare and fleeting thing it appears to me to be?