On Being Exuberant

It's too bad, at least in my opinion as well as experience, that happy, exuberant, joyful people are considered dumb and even immature. So much advice is given to adults about "retain your bliss", or "look at the world with childlike eyes of wonder", or "celebrate the little things with a song in your heart and a spring in your step" or similar sayings. And yet, it seems, that when people do, unless they are younger than 7 or older than 87 years old, these expressions of excitement and happiness and self-confidence are disapproved of.

I went into a quilt shop fairly recently, excited about the fabrics I wanted to buy. Smiling and happy as I was, the tones of disapproval and condescension from the shop staff were overt. It wasn't as though I was being silly or loud or really all that exuberant. Just happy. But the pursed lips from the staff, as though they'd just eaten a lemon, and the Dickensian schoolmarm tones were off-putting to the point I'll not shop there again.

We want to live in a happy world, handle our troubles and weighty experiences with as much ease and levity as possible. And yet when we do, we are judged, mocked, shushed, and even killed for it. It starts in families but then we begin to experience it from friends, teachers, cops, doctors, and all the rest of society. "Why are you so happy?" a colleague might say. Or "No one's gonna take you seriously" a sibling might say. Or "OK people let's be serious" a teacher might say.

It really is too bad that the unhappiness of some tries so hard to dictate the enthusiasm of others. But worse, I think, that the happiness of some is seen as a mark of idiocy by others.

Oh well. I'll keep smiling and being joyful instead of sour and dour. When I'm on my deathbed, I'm not going to be laying there thinking, "Gosh, I really should have been more acerbic in my life."