The Key to Happiness
Etymology, the luck of the Irish, quantum physics, art, and YOU
TLDR: I secure existence through you as my witness.
Here’s a lil timely etymology from Merriam Em-ster to kick things off. The word "happy" comes from the Middle English "hap", meaning "chance" or "fortune" (think of "happenstance" or "perhaps"). It originally implied luck rather than an internal state of joy.
Breakdown of its evolution:
Old Norse: happ (meaning “luck” or “chance”)
Middle English: hap (meaning “good fortune” or “luck”)
14th century: happy emerges, meaning “fortunate” or “lucky”
16th century onward: The meaning shifts to “feeling pleasure or contentment,” emphasizing an internal state rather than external luck.
Now, let’s consider the proverbial “life, liberty, and the pursuit of ‘happiness.’” If happiness is something that just happens, a welcome consequence of chance, how might one pursue it? Does one even pursue it at all? Do you, my beloved Muser? Comment and let me know your musings.
In the meantime, let’s talk about chance a la probability a la quantum physics (stick with me— I promise it will be lovely), then go into performance, music, and falling in love.
Part 1: Schrödinger’s Cat & The Collapse of Possibility
Of all the famous cats— Simba, Garfield, In the Hat— none is so elusive as Schrödinger’s. This cat was conjured in 1935 by Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger to exemplify a concept in quantum physics called superposition. Superposition is the idea that a something can exist in multiple states at once until, most importantly, IT IS OBSERVED (make note of this condition— it will be important later on.) In physics, these “somethings” are usually quanta (the smallest particles we could break matter down into at the time of dear ole Erwin), but in this experiment, the “something” is a cat.
This cat is placed inside a box with a vial of poison that will be slowly releasing radioactivity. According to quantum mechanics, until someone opens the box, the cat exists in both states simultaneously—alive and dead. The moment the box is opened, the superposition collapses into a single reality: either the cat lives, or it dies.
This paradox reveals something profound about observation: until something is seen, it exists in a state of infinite potential. Reality is not fixed until it is witnessed and interpreted.
This is not just a phenomenon in physics. For me, this is a fundamental law of life.
Part 2: Purim, Improvisation, & the Art of Co-Creation
Last Thursday, I celebrated the Jewish holiday Purim in a way that felt like stepping into this quantum space. Purim is a holiday of reversal and transformation, of masks and revelations, of structured chaos. To honor this universal inevitability, The Temple of the Stranger put on an epic event at the House of Yes that led the audience on a journey through self-discovery and ultimately self-celebration.
As the MC of the night and driver of the narrative as sexy, silly cat Queen Esther, I really really really wanted to make sure I had my lines and cues down PAT (or, should I say, pet?). I recited them over and over walking, driving, showering, getting groceries, before sleep. I got into character watching cat videos and eating kibble (jk— though I did snack on beef like it was cat-nip). And then, at a certain point, my brain STOPPED.
I wanted to practice more, but my brain just wouldn’t. It wouldn’t drill lines one more time. It wouldn’t watch another video. It wouldn’t even listen to the song I’d be dancing to on stage. For the two days leading up to the event, my mind just went blank.
This blankness is familiar. For every creative endeavor I do, whether it be a performance or Emuse episode or Museletter, there comes a point when my brain switches off and puts the endeavor out of my mind. I now recognize that it is at this point when the real preparation begins. This blankness is my mind’s surrender into the divine quantum destiny. What will emerge in the presence of the observer? Will I be alive? Will I be dead? Will I learn once again that binaries aren’t the essence of reality if we dig deep enough?
Sure enough, the moment the audience entered the room, everything shifted. The show became something different because they were there. I became something different.
Each laugh, each response, each unexpected interruption pulled the performance down a different possible path, until we arrived at the end and the show had become real—not the version I and my fellow creators had planned, but the one we and the audience had created together.
It is an honor, a privilege and a divine calling for me to be able to ride these parallel paths and co-create with you, the audience/reader/listener. This is my path to happiness.
You as a witness makes me feel my existence.
I am your Schrodinger’s cat.
Part 3: The Radio Show & How It Forms in Real Time
A similar thing happened the next day with my Luck of the Pirish (listen here) Emuse radio show. When I started planning it, it was just an idea in my head—a superposition of possible shows. I wanted to do something with pi because it was Pi Day (3/14) and about luck because of St. Paddy’s. I decided to do a superposition, BOTH-AND style: songs about Pi/pie interspersed with stories from my listeners about the luckiest thing that has ever happened to them.
Come Friday morning at 8am, I still hadn’t finished my show. What’s more, I had never done a call-in show before and was a little nervous to surrender completely to whoever would call in (if anyone WOULD even call in). But instead of finishing the setlists and planning back-ups in case you listeners (my ‘observers’) didn’t come through and call, I just went blank. I listened to some relaxing music, thought about nothing, and trust-fell into the anything-and-everything-ness the show will be.
Then I turned on the mic.
The moment I was on air and people began calling in, the show took shape in a glorious way. It collapsed into reality. The callers shaped it. The music shaped it. The energy of the night before shaped it. The show was no longer just mine—it belonged to the moment itself.
This requires thorough preparation AND complete surrender. Both-and.
^^E gettin jiggy w it in the studio
Part 4: The Key to Happiness is to Let Things Happen
Both of these performances—Purim and the radio show—exist in an infinite state of possibility until they are observed. It is in the faithful act of allowing the emergence— of letting things happen— that I find purpose and clarity, even though this still leaves everything soaked in mystery and magic. And it is through letting things happen that I find happiness.
Dear God, I surrender to you, again and again and again. I am your loyal cat, dead, alive, infinite in my finitude and finite in my instantiation of infinity, contained yet connected, contracting through expansion and expanding through contraction, all things, no thing, anything you need me to be. The paradox and also an axiomatic quantum truth of being a creature creating: I cannot be put in a box.
Part 5: A Peek Behind the Curtain
This is the essence of my one woman show. I am Schrodinger’s Pussy (S.P.), navigating the universe of infinite potential and reconciling the truth that being witnessed may be the thing that kills me but it also may be the thing that births me into new life.
Next week, I will teach you one of the most important lessons I’ve learned about falling in love.
Specifically, as S.P., I straddle the boundary between love and lust. I will share with you a poem that explores this superposition, and the background of how it came to exist through infinite quantum states into a fully collapsed reality.
Through YOU, my dear witness.
In the hope, that perhaps, by making this happen, we may all find happiness.
Please let me know your musings about any and all things. May we be one another’s witnesses.
PS Tune in to Emuse this Friday March 21 9am-12 on wpkn.org for my woman’s history month show “Undercover Divas”, a show featuring all songs originally done by men, then covered and DONE BETTER by a woman. Featuring an interview and live performance with singer, songwriter, and soul-sister Clare Maloney.
“The pursuit of happiness “ will not lead to happiness. Let happiness happen serendipitously!
I love this idea of self-discovery through witnessing and co-creation. As a writer primarily working solo at the moment, I often forget that all creative works are collaborations—at the very least with an audience, with history, and with time. Often, they involve direct collaboration with other creative people as well.
Filmmakers I know (who often have hundreds of collaborators) talk about this all the time. There's the film you intend to create, the one you make with the crew, the one you shape with the editor, and later still, the one that emerges with the audience, time, and history. Each version is distinct, yet all of them exist.
I also appreciate this idea of entering a flow state through surrender. But that can feel risky for those of us taught to protect ourselves. We develop patterns and internalize messages that block flow (e.g., "I will be attacked if I take up too much space," or "My ideas are never appreciated"). On the other hand, anyone who easily enters a flow state also needs a good editor. Not every idea needs to be shared; not every idea is our best.
Letting things unfold, going with the flow, ideally allows us to see things as they are, rather than through the screen of our conditioned thinking. Collaborating with diverse communities seems key to eroding those screens and expanding our understanding of our current limits.
One way to define both intelligence and creativity is as the ability to see clearly what is happening right now and to respond flexibly, rather than relying on a rigid set of responses. The more we can enter a flow state with others, the smarter and more creative we become.