When Did Happiness Become So Complicated?

When was the last time you felt uncomplicatedly happy?

Not simply pleased with how your day went. We mean the kind of happiness that makes your chest feel a little too small to contain it.

Think about sleepovers at your cousins’ house, where nobody actually slept. Every ten minutes, someone would sit up because they had remembered one more thing that absolutely had to be said.

Or the cricket matches that stretched across an entire summer holiday. The same green tennis ball. The same three rules everyone argued about. Someone’s mother calling out that lunch was getting cold while nobody moved because the match was tied.

Maybe it was the one family trip you waited for every year. Or your school annual day, when the stage belonged to you for three minutes. It did not matter that you were nervous or that you missed a step. Everyone was watching, and for those three minutes, it felt enormous.

We think about these memories often.

Not only because of what happened, but because of the feeling that surrounded them. Everything felt larger than life. We felt completely present. We felt exhilarated.

A few years ago, one of us tried surfing for the first time.

The first day was rough. There was a lot of falling, swallowing seawater and wondering why anyone found this enjoyable.

On the second day, something changed. A wave came, and for a few seconds, everything aligned. The board held. The body understood. The wave carried us forward.

Coming out of the water, there was a feeling we had not experienced in months, perhaps years.

Exhilaration.

It was the same feeling that made childhood seem so grand.

The next time we felt it was at Bloom. Not during one performance or one perfect moment, but across the entire three days.

That is why we continue to build this village.

We are not trying to create another pleasant weekend away. We are trying to make space for the feeling that once found us naturally on cricket fields, inside our cousins’ rooms at two in the morning and in the backseat of the same family car every year.

That feeling does not require a wave or a stage. It needs a place capable of holding it. It needs room to be curious, people who begin to feel familiar by the second day and the sense that, for this brief moment, we belong here together.

Perhaps this feeling has become harder to find. We are more connected than any generation before us, yet genuine presence often has to be chosen deliberately.

Our attention is constantly being pulled elsewhere. A conversation around a fire asks something different from us than another hour spent inside a feed. It asks us to remain where we are.

This is what Chapter Seven is being built around.

A temporary village in nature. A place to live alongside one another, try unfamiliar things, make art, move, listen, learn and remember how it feels to be completely inside your own life.

We are not ready to reveal everything yet.

For now, go and find your version of that wave.

We will meet you on the other side.

With love,
Team Bloom in Green