«Happiness is not a state to arrive at , but a manner of travelling.»
– Margaret Lee Runbeck
Happiness is not a straight road. Instead, it is a shifting geography, full of valleys, ridges and winding paths. Some lives are built like well-paved highways, others like dirt trails that must be cleared step by step. And some of us, perhaps, live on maps that were never fully drawn, forced to chart new routes as we go.
Because, whether it’s obvious to people or not, every life is like a landscape;
A house has its walls, a body its bones.
But what about a ‘soul’?
It might sound like religious mumbo-jumbo, but I personally don’t see it that way. Instead I simply see a human soul as a type of energy that may move from one physical person to the next – yet the actual energy in question stays the same.
Within such an idea, human souls have maps of their own, with rivers of memories and mountains of effort, valleys of grief, or plateus of joy.
These maps are then charted and re-charted throughout our life.
It is during these times that the highways most often travelled are quite often mistaken as the only routes worth knowing. But this is quite unfortionate.
As a disabled person, I often feel this truth in my bones. My body does not move easily along the «main roads» society lays out. While others may follow smooth highways, such as ‘ wake up early, work harsh, go to the gym, parent kids, cook, clean, relax and go to sleep early’ my own body can not keep up with this for very long. I sometimes face steep climbs, uneven ground or dead-ends; I mean, If it weren’t for coffee, I would not be able to stay awake for more than a few hours at a time, and on ‘work days’ I have no energy to work-out, and on ‘working-out days’ I need to seriously cut down the amount of daily chores, to be able to wake up the next day. And despite planning all of this beforehand, days can still crumble at my feet due to my daily seizures.
The Blind Spot: Disability as Geography
Writers and dreamers have always tried to draw the inner world of mankind. Carl jung spoke of archetypal terrains; poets of rivers and deserts within us. Early cartographers feared the unknown, and filled the edges of their charts with monsters and sea-dragons. Silence is scary. Slowness seen as failure. Pauses are treated like death.But slowness is not the same as absence. Stillness is not void. It’s a terrotory of it’s own, demanding a different kind of navigation.
«The queter you become, the more you are able to hear».
– Maria Rilke
Furthermore, every map – like every life has it’s own blank spots; whether dismissed corners, uncharted spaces or unexplored areas. But what if these empty spaces weren’t voids from a soulful energy – but equally as powerful, instead?
– all potential roads to further happiness.
This is where disability enters the map. Society says: you’re stuck, you’re left behind. You’re too slow, too fragile, too dependent. But here’s the truth: in enforced stillness, whole new geographies open. There are rivers of intimacy – conversation that go deepeer because they have time to. Valleys of observation – details noticed because they cannot be rushed past.
Fortresses of resilience – strength born not from running around faster, but from enduring longer.
Society builds highways and calls them progress. But what if the footpath, the garden trail, the detour intoo slowness held more truth than the asphalt? What if the lives that refuse to be measured by speed are the ones that actually reveal the shape of being alive?
Mary Oliver put it simply;
«To pay attention to, this is our endless and proper work.»
Attention is not a byproduct of speed. It is instead the reward for stillness.
The Cartography of Self
Interestingly enough, all these detours in the ‘landscape of life’ are neither empty nor pointless. Instead, they carry their own cartography, and what others see as obstacles, I see as landmarks of resilience. What others call delay becomes time to notice hidden beauty; the shade or muscle of a tree, the echo of children’s laughter, or the texture of nice woolen clothing.
For those of us whose bodies carry limits or pain, the map looks different. What others mark as shortcuts, may for us be an impassable cliff. What other’s may see as a detour may be our main road.
Because. in these hidden geographies, happiness and joy takes root differently – in small landmarks, in resting places, and in the secret gardens we discover along the way.
This is not only about disability. All of us live by maps that shift. Grief redraws the borders. Love reroutes our compass. Even rest – as the simple act of pausing, can reveal a different landscape than what we thought we were walking.
The question then, is not where happiness is, but rather how we draw it. Perhaps happiness is never found in one destination. Perhaps it lies instead in the hidden maps we keep redrawing – the quiet coordinates of laughter with a friend, the unexplected alley of rest, or the compass of our values pointing us home to ourselves, again and again.
These are the geographies that shape a life worth inhabiting.
Because, we are meant to inhabit our homes fully, whether those homes are houses, bodies or landscapes of the soul. They are waiting for us to enter, to map them – and make them our own.
Rebecca Solnit once wrote that:
«walking is how the body measures itself against the earth»
– but I think the same could be said about living. Each scar, each memory, each day spent resting or striving or breaking or bonding, becomes a line drawn across the map of who we are. The mistake we make as human beings is believing the map never ends.
Sooner or later, our energy will run out. And when it does, I hope I will be able to look back at a landscape filled with immense experience. This is because, for me – I have always wanted to be able to experience most of what life has to offer.
– Silje
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A task for you, reader:
This week, sketch your own map of happiness. It doesn’t have to be beautiful or even accurate – just draw the roads, rivers, or landmarks that make up the hidden geographies of your life.
– Where are your valleys of rest?
– Where are your steep climbs of ambition?
– Where are the rivers that carry you slowly but surely forward?
– Which mountains have you been forced to climb, and what summits have you reached?
– What hidden gardens have you discovered along the way`?
Notice the blank spaces. They are not empty – they are waiting for you to fill them. And when you do, remember this: the world has always belonged not to those who run the fastest, but to those who dare to chart the unseen.
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Further reading: 
Wanderlust: A History of Walking by Rebecca Solnit
The Art of Happiness by Dalai Lama & Howard Cutler
The Geography of Bliss by Eric Weiner
Atlas of the Heart by Brené Brown
