what to do

 

 

It's difficult to know what to do with so much happiness. 

With sadness, there's something to rub against.

 A wound to tend with lotion and cloth. 

When the world falls in around you,

 you have pieces to pick up something to hold

 in your hands like ticket stubs or change.

 

 But happiness floats. 

It doesn't need you to hold it down.

 Doesn't need anything.

Happiness lands on the roof of the next house singing

 and disappears when it wants to. 

You're happy either way. 

Even the fact that you once lived in a peaceful treehouse

 and now live over a quarry of noise and dust 

cannot make you unhappy. 

 

Everything has a life of its own.

 It, too, could wake up filled with possibilities of coffee cake

 and ripe peaches and love even the floor which needs to be swept,

 the soiled linens,and scratched records.Since there's no place large enough

 to contain so much happiness, you shrug, you raise your hands, 

and it flows out of you into everything you touch. 

 

You're not responsible.

 You take no credit.

 

 As the night sky takes no credit for the moon, 

but continues to hold it and to share it 

and in that way, be known.

~  Naomi Shihab Nye
photo - children of Papua New Guinea