HAPPY CHATTER

I see life's moments as if they are written on a page. What fascinates me is never the obvious, but the undercurrent of what is being seen or said. Like the scriptwriter, I imagine what is really meant and I hear it, playing like subtitles in my head—

Polite words masking indifference. Harsh words hiding hurt and despair. It’s not so much the verbal exchange between people that intrigues me, but what isn't being said.

In the distance, we see people gathered. We see them before we hear them, enjoying conversation in the late summer sun. There is no dialogue that can be discerned, only music playing and the scriptwriter’s note, two simple words, passing through the scene—

[Happy Chatter.]

I wonder now at the visceral impact of these two words that made my heart, at the seeing them,  skip a beat.

In the time it takes to change the frame there is this audible little gasp—me, struck full force by the notion that this gathering of people in the distance, now coming into focus on the screen, could be cheerful, seemingly genuinely and completely serene.

And I am caught up in the thought that we work so hard at simply being happy, when it should be no work at all.

Chatter, the talking incessantly over trivial matters...I can’t imagine another word that more accurately describes the who and what we have become.

That chatter is all around us and in us, taking up residence in the vulnerable and curious parts of our brain. It is omnipresent and invasive, as if watching and evaluating ourselves like characters in a movie or a play.

“Janene,” I hear me asking myself, “Is your chatter happy?” Never mind what all the outside voices are expounding and repeating, what is the conversation inside my own head?

My body has been teaching me that it craves the company of a beautiful mind. Each tiny cell expands or contracts as I command it, in the direction that I think and believe it will.

The unspoken syllables of each untamed thought, like molecules, are either in the service of life or death.

Which would you choose? Which DO you choose—
~In what you worry and fret about
~In how you judge every little aspect of others and yourself
~In allowing fear of what may happen to overrun your brain
~In obsessing over what went on before, overwhelmed by shame
~In participating [even silently] in conversations that trouble the soul?

Do. Not. Let. Your. Heart. Be. Troubled—

Not good-natured advice but a command,

from the One who formed me,

Who knew me from the beginning, knew what was to come, and what is ahead.

Happy Chatter. For a woman who seeks the deepest meaning of everything, these simple words have become extraordinarily profound.