if it feels good... do it.

I'm sure everybody's done something completely gratuitous in their lives. Something you did not because you had to, but because you wanted to, and something, moreover, that didn't need to be done again.

This morning, I had two bagels, sesame, toasted just right: light brown. Crispy, with the crunchy goodness of sesame seeds, and slathered with artery-hardening margarine.

I didn't need two bagels. I just wanted two bagels. And I thought, "Why not? You never know when you might eat your last bagel."

The hell with my waistline, to hell with high cholesterol levels, transfats and heart disease. Nobody ever dies wishing they'd eaten one less bagel, or put less multi-colored sprinkles on a third scoop of icecream, or had one less afternoon of crazy-good sex, do they?

And, a corollary:

While there may be such a thing as "too much of a good thing," I'm convinced there's never too much happiness in the world.

Happiness is self-limiting, for one thing. Start to feel happy about one thing, and something else goes haywire. It's like, an unwritten law of the universe.

Also, I've never understood why people are always yammering on about the "mystery of life" and "mystery of love," but not the mystery of happiness.

Happiness, whatever else may be said about it, is mysterious. It works in subtle, almost magical ways at times. It isn't necessarily the same thing joy, or love, or hope... although it may be some of those things, some of the time. Happiness is a funny little gnome, really. If you look at it directly, it seems to disappear, and if you look at it indirectly, it always seems just a little further to your left--or right--than you expected. And when you try to explain happiness to someone else, they don't really understand what you're talking about, just the way I suspect no two people see color the same way.

But you know it when you feel it.

And if eating two bagels at five thirty in the morning is a good thing that makes you happy--I say, do it. After all, mysteries are rarely that easy to catch and solve, especially at dawn, when you're still tired and need to walk the dog.