Happiness Is.... Poem by gershon hepner

HAPPINESS IS…

Happiness is your accepting your
gravely flawed reality,
realizing that there is a cure,
your potentiality.

Deborah Copaken Kogan writes in an NYTBR 5/27/12 essay about Erich Segal's 1985 book "The Class" ('Only Yesterday") :

Ultimately, "The Class" makes the reader feel sorry for its men, whose constant jockeying for fame and power, for "significance, " undermines any gratitude they might have felt for those gifts they possessed in such abundance — life, love, a shot at tomorrow — while simultaneously making them suspicious of those very same ambitions in their Radcliffe classmates. "I mean, brains are O.K. for a girl in moderation, " Andrew Eliot wrote in his diary, "but the Radcliffe types are so... intellectual — and competitive — that they sometimes make you forget why the Lord created women." Though, of one female character Segal wrote: "Fanny had a talent he had not encountered in all the girls he'd dated in America. She was happy just being herself." Perhaps that's what we "competitive Radcliffe types" actually brought to both Harvard and the Harvard narrative — heck, what women have brought to every formerly all-male university and institution: an understanding that while a fancy degree and external validations are nice, they are the icing not the cake; that "happiness" can only be found in acceptance of the flawed self.

5/38/12 #10339