Fleeting happiness

Between Saturday and yesterday, I spent a cool six hours in the Baltimore airport on layovers, which gave me more than enough time to watch a movie, read a book and then ponder until I fell asleep on my flight.

I just finished watching the movie, "The Freedom Writers" and then bought the book in the airport Borders - pretty interesting movie and book, even though the movie is a bit "MTV" at times (they produced it). Primarily, the movie appealed to me for the same reasons that "Coach Carter" did - one of my deepest desires has always been to really change someone's life in a positive way. Seeing movies, or reading stories about people who impact others in a positive and dramatic way always inspires me, but also forces me to look for meaning in all that I do.

As a writer, the topics written about by the students amazed me. While their stories were compelling, their writing style was really impressive for students that supposedly were "nothing" in the system. While you got a good feel for their writing in the movie, the book is the actual writing - and it shows so much more.

There is a part in the book, where the teacher shows them a poem that someone wrote. The person who wrote it attended college with her, and drowned in the San Francisco Bay shortly after writing it. More or less, it focused on the present and the future. After reading the poem, the teacher posed this question to the students - "'If you could live an eternity and not change a thing or exist for the blink of an eye and alter everything, what would you choose?"

We experience days, weeks, months, and even years where it seems that nothing is right. If we could change this, have that, everything would be better. Then, we experience that one fleeting moment where everything is perfect - the moment in time that you wish you could freeze. Yet nothing major has changed; your life simply handed you the moment you had been waiting for.
I'm coming off of a weekend that I could describe as perfect. While I was nothing but happy for a few days, coming back to reality hits that much harder. And the changes that would have to be made to make this more than just a fleeting moment, aren't likely or reasonable right now.

I wonder what it would be like to feel content - to not have the fleeting moments of extreme happiness, but rather a comfortable feeling of contentment. Would that be better that having those moments that leave you wanting more?