what's wrong with a little happiness?

Into this steamy heat I went a few hours ago, on my way to errands. I was driving my yellow car. I was thinking about the heirloom tomatoes I would buy, the watermelon and feta, the chunky bread. Thinking about lamb chops for dinner, maybe. Thinking I might treat myself to a pot of ACME roses.

As the first light went from red to green, as I accelerated, something inside me stopped.

I'm happy, I thought.

I'm happy.

I had cleaned the house in the early morning. I had scanned 30 new pages for the Juncture memoir workshop now set for less than a month from now. I had written to a friend. I'd cracked an egg to make my breakfast and found, within, twin yolks. This had been my day so far. And it seemed a perfect one.

How long has this simple happiness eluded me? What did it take far too many years to step away from so much that hurt, degraded, deflated, consumed, buried me with worry, kept me up at the wrong hours, made me feel less than, a last-in-line priority? We never know how much more time we have. We are bound (oh, trust me, I know) by responsibilities. But I had lived so subsumed by burdens that I had not made room for simple happiness.

Watermelon. Heirlooms. Feta. Homegrown mint. Chunky bread.

A pot of ACME roses.

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choose happiness

On the topic of happiness, two recent essays give us up.

The first is "Rhapsody in Realism," in which David Brooks reflects on Lydia Netzer's "15 Ways to Stay Married for 15 Years." The theory has to do with imperfection. Fessing up to it. Facing it. Living with it. I quote:

But Netzer’s piece is nicely based on the premise that we are crooked timber. We are, to varying degrees, foolish, weak, and often just plain inexplicable — and always will be. As Kant put it: “Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made.”

People with a crooked timber mentality tend to see life as full of ironies. Intellectual life is ironic because really smart people often do the dumbest things precisely because they are carried away by their own brilliance. Politics is ironic because powerful people make themselves vulnerable because they think they can achieve more than they can. Marriage is ironic because you are trying to build a pure relationship out of people who are ramshackle and messy. There’s an awesome incongruity between the purity you glimpse in the love and the fact that he leaves used tissues around the house and it drives you crazy.

The second piece was part of my daily Linked-In feed, a story by Bernard Marr about happiness and how it might be found. Marr has five tips for us: Live a life true to yourself, don't work so hard, have the courage to express your feelings, stay in touch with your friends, let yourself be happier.

Let yourself be happier.

He explains:

Happiness, it turns out, doesn’t have that much to do with the car you drive or the job you have or even the person you spend your life with. Happiness is actually a choice.

It’s the difference between seeing an unexpected event as a setback or an adventure; the difference between being frustrated by a delay or relishing the time alone; the difference between resenting someone for who they aren’t and loving them for who they are.

We don’t have to repeat the mistakes of those who have gone before us. Our happiness, our success, nearly every detail of our lives comes down to choice, and we can choose to live the way we truly want to live, or spend our final days regretting the choices we didn’t make.

 We are all flawed people, that's a fact. But we still, thank goodness, have choices we can make. 

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happiness immemorial

"You look happy," I told a friend yesterday.  We were at the dance studio, a dark storm lashing against the window glass. 

"Of course," he said.

I asked him why, half a joke, a plea for sun on a rumbling day.  He began (it was easy for him) to enumerate.  Youth was on his list.  Health.  Love.  Opportunity.  Dance.  Not riches, he said.  He wouldn't want riches.  Riches wouldn't make him happy.

A little girl came in, next to dance.  She put on her shoes, he bowed to her, they walked down the hall, arms linked together.  I went out into the storm and for the rest of that night, my friend's happiness was mine, his celebration of what we have right now, this moment.

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Happiness Business: Beth Kephart Poem

This happiness business of yours being
nearly complete, being
I’m not saying
swagger or stomp,
not claiming
the rogue refutation of what
(may we speak honestly?)
is still life as we know it—
which is to say steady on no feet,
and too lovely and perceptible
to save itself.

That is not what I said
or not what I would have said
had you not, again,
been heading out the door—
your cap gyroscoped back
on your head,
your assurances
nineteen years old
and clever,
your words tossed
over the sudden brawn
of your shoulder:
Don't worry it will be late so I won’t wake you.

Absolutely not:
Wake me.

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Whole Happiness

"Your happiness could be contagious," the headline read (Melissa Dahl, MSNBC, December 4), and who is not going to stop and read an article that describes the state of joy as a catching kind of virus, with Framington Heart Study researchers "able to measure a three-degree spread of (one) person's cheer"?

"On average," the researchers wrote, "every happy person in your social network increases your chance of cheer by 9 percent—and the effects of catching someone else's happiness lasts up to one year." A "stranger's good mood" packs more wallop than a pay raise. It enhances health, fuels longevity. It rests responsibility for reverberating goodness right back where it belongs: on the shoulders of each one of us.

If such is the case (and from now, I'm banking on it), my own life was extended immeasurably last night at Julia and Gene's gracious home, where we celebrated the happiness of parents-to-be, Cristina and Jeremy. In that big, Wissahickon-schist house with a hallway built for waltzing, we were teachers, entrepreneurs, students, those just starting out on a career and those weighing the possibility of new directions. We were, in other words, the ballroom dancers who have found their way to a studio called Dancesport and who have, in the course of going toe-to-toe with the party samba, the pass-your-feet foxtrot, the too-fast cha-cha, the deep-kneed bolero, and the go-slow-so-you-can-dance-it-fast salsa, forged a community of the viral-happiness variety.

Last night was whole. It was warm and good and moving and right—a fire in the fireplace, a to-die-for spread, cloth napkins!, provocatively shaped forks, a Georgette-caliber cake (and that would make it quite a cake), a child named Mercy taking notes, and a father-to-be's expression of love for the woman whom he has chosen as his wife.

I will float on this happiness for weeks to come.

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