Pretty happy

When someone asks, 'how are you?' instead of saying 'pretty good', as I've pretty much always answered in the past, I am now going to say 'pretty happy.'

This might accomplish two things: 1) cause the listener, the one who is after all the one who asked the question, to listen to, to hear the answer instead of the answer becoming the unheard rote formality it usually becomes and 2) be an answer more attuned to the reality of the answerer.

I am thinking here of Hans-Georg Gadamer's observation:

                    "We say we 'conduct' a conversation, but the more genuine
                        a conversation is, the less its conduct lies within the will of
                        either partners. Thus a genuine conversation is never the one
                        that we wanted to conduct."

My thinking is that if I answer 'pretty happy' instead of 'pretty good' the chances are that the change from good to happy might prompt the kind of 'horizonless' conversation that Gadamer, a German philosopher who died in 2002 at the age of 102, promoted as a path toward the ideal.

The thing that makes me pretty happy at the moment is that it is a fine day after a rainy day and I can see the bridge from my window.