What I don't understand is that happiness has never been a part of my life equations.

Never after the =. Never before or after + or -. Never as quotient or denominator or numerator. Maybe as square root of something or the other, but that's theoretical and starts to deal with imaginary numbers.

And yet, at the monastery, something flipped the "happiness" switch on the back of my neck to the "on" position. And suddenly it's just here as easily as I can conjure the word "joy" or "serenity" in my mind in glowing block letters on a dark background.

I skeptically take a pinch of it and rub it between my fingers trying to figure what it is, what is the nature of it, and it's something that just forms out of a calmness rooted both in a hyper-realization of the material world around me, and in the voidness of form once you start breaking down moments of time and its passing, and the impermanence of these forms as they move through this time. Woof.

And mind you, nothing has changed. Nothing I was before has been negated.