The Secret to Happiness

Okay, I may have lied just a little bit. I don’t have the secret to happiness.

Wait- wait! Please don’t go. It’s so… cold here, all by myself…

In my head, I pictured a colorful photo of the desert above this article, with some succinct, yet poignant, words of wisdom concerning how to live life and find love.

Unfortunately, I don’t have those words, though I won’t leave you, dear, sweet, Constant Reader, with nothing. I in fact do have a colorful photo of the desert. That should count for something, at the very least.

I took this photo in the Black and White Desert, just a couple hours drive west from Cairo, Egypt. It’s an incredible place- a flat vista of sand, interrupted only by strange sculptures of wind-shaped chalk, which rise out of the desert sand like creatures from the underworld trying to break loose from their unending sandy prison.

I can’t say I was happy when I took this picture, but I did feel peaceful. It was the silence. In the evening, when it was time to roll out the beds and get a fire going, the only sound was from my breathing, and the rustling noises of my companions.

That first night, I thought I might be going crazy. It was so quiet, I thought my ears might be broken, or maybe I’d had a stroek. Really- I mean- not a sound- anywhere.

For miles and miles and miles in any direction, all you would get was more sand and silence. No bugs. No animals. No plants. No water. Just sky and sand and silence.

I wasn’t happy. I wasn’t unhappy. But I can tell you, I slept like a rock in that desert.