I’m Just Happy

Every Wednesday at three o’clock my time, my phone rings. Almost without fail. Usually within a minute or two of the time we set for our call.

There is something about that kind of faithfulness that reaches me. Nothing big. It is ordinary: a call at the same time each week, a voice on the other end, a conversation that begins again. But after enough weeks, ordinary things start to mean something in their own quiet way.

The man who calls has been inside since he was young. He is serving a very long sentence for a nonviolent crime. This is something he carries.

There are parts of his story that could easily seem to become the center of everything: the unfairness, the years, the distance from the life he might have lived, the feeling that something was taken and cannot be given back. From that perspective, it can seem difficult to look beyond them..

Some experiences can seem painful. And sometimes the impulse is to move too quickly to an interpretation instead of first acknowledging how things appear. 

But what amazes me about him is not that he ignores what seems to be unfairness. It is that he keeps questioning what the unfairness is doing inside him.

He has been watching the belief that he was treated unfairly. Not denying it. Not pretending the facts do not matter. Just noticing how that thought can quietly become a place to live. How it can shape a day, a conversation, and the way the future feels.

How it can become a kind of prison inside the prison.

That is not easy. It takes courage to look at your circumstances and say, this is hard. It may take even more to look inward and ask, what am I doing with the hardness?

That is what I see him practicing. He studies most days. He reads, reflects, and asks real questions. He even has a name for the inner voice he is learning to trust. He calls it “Soc,” after a character from a book we have been reading together—a wise old mentor who keeps nudging a younger man awake.

It is his way of talking about the steadier part of himself. The part that can pause before reacting. The part that can see through the old story without needing to be loud about it.

And when he writes about “Soc,” it does not sound like an idea he is trying to explain. It sounds like a relationship he is learning to listen to.

A while back, a letter came from him with an update. There was plenty of news in it, the kind that comes from life inside. But what stayed with me was how he ended it.

He wrote:

“I’m just happy. I’m able to soak up some of this positivity that’s floating around me lately. Or was it ALWAYS there, just waiting for me to open myself up and receive it?”

I read lines like that repeatedly.

I’m just happy.

There are sentences that sound simple until you remember where they are being spoken from. A man inside. A man with a long sentence. A man with every reason to build a life around grievance. A man who could be waiting for the outside to change before letting himself feel anything at all.

And there he was, writing those words not as denial or performance, but as a discovery.

Then came the question underneath it.

Was it always there?

Maybe happiness is not always something that arrives from far off. Maybe peace is not always something we build from scratch. Maybe some of the good is already near us, and we are not always open enough to take it in.

I know what it feels like to be closed. To be so fixed on what is missing that I cannot feel what is present. To be sure peace is waiting on a person, an apology, a decision, or some future moment when life finally feels settled.

And sometimes those things matter. Sometimes we really are waiting for something real. But I keep learning, often from men inside, that waiting does not have to mean withholding our whole life until it comes.

We can still receive, laugh and be surprised by joy.

That does not make the walls disappear. It does not shorten the sentence. It does not erase the injustice or quiet the longing for home.

But it does mean the heart is not completely owned by the circumstance.

I am headed back to Ohio to see him soon. It will be our second in-person visit, which we refer to as a, “Jedi Summit.”

That name warms my heart, and it also feels right.

There is something playful and serious about our connection at the same time. We talk about the mind, forgiveness, old beliefs, inner guidance, and the strange work of waking up to life as it is.

But we also laugh. A lot.

That matters to me. If the work gets too heavy, it turns into another burden. If it gets too solemn, we start performing our progress instead of living it.

Sometimes the most honest thing two people can do is laugh together while still telling the truth.

I am grateful for that with him: for the calls, the letters, the way he keeps showing up, and his willingness to look at a painful story without letting it be the only story.

And I am grateful for the sentence he handed me.

I’m just happy.

Maybe happiness does not come loudly. Maybe sometimes it comes quietly, after years of believing it could only come later.

Maybe it comes when we stop gripping the old story quite so hard and finally let ourselves receive what has been near us the whole time.

And for all that, I am just happy too.