"This is what happiness is made of."
Dec. 8th, 2009 12:07 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ysobelleI was going through some old files on my old laptop, and I realised my permissions for Word are all screwed up. I couldn't actually read any of my documents. How annoying! So, grumbling, I transferred them to my iDisk, and opened them up here.
Paper or pixels, going through old letters and writing and files is always a mixed bag. I found two pieces from '06 that I wrote that just made me cry: a private journal entry, a letter never sent. A naivete that just makes me ache. Old drafts, tickets, written snapshots of stranger days.
But I also came across a piece I wrote, oh, I don't know when. Years ago, now. I was thinking about it a few months ago, when I held Marble late one night and wondered if I could count the rest of my time with her in hours. (As I write this, she has given up on me in disgust for not giving her yet another full can of tuna today-- it would be her third? Fourth? and she'll get it, but not til later-- and is now sprawled across my shoes on the other side of the room, pretending not to see me, but waiting, waiting til I stand up.) I remembered I'd written this piece, and I remembered there was something in it I needed to reread, to be reminded of once again. But I couldn't find it til now.
So here it is, to remind me. And anyone else who might need it.
I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately about happiness. About what it really is, and what it means to be happy. It’s been a confluence of events, I think, starting a few weekends ago at the Pennsylvania Renaissance Faire, and pretentious overanalytic that I am, I’ve mulled it and simmered it in my brain quite a while now. It’s almost stew at this point, so I thought I’d share.
Faire, I should tell you, is something writ large on my heart. I love my week-job, don’t get me wrong, but faire is like swimming in cool, clear water—assuming my spontaneous growth of gills, of course. It’s something that’s a much bigger part of me than a conglomeration of smooth muscle and organ meats should be able to contain. This faire, any faire, is my home, and my comfort. I have a few things in my life that are like that, and I’m lucky for each and every one. I seem to feel and think more clearly there than anywhere else, and deeper things seem to happen to me there.
Late one Saturday evening, I went for an unexpected moonlight stroll with a handsome young man of my acquaintance. A piper, no less: with red hair and sparkling eyes and an open, plain, Montana way of speaking. We’ve known each other for years, and we’ve been at the same show every weekend since Ohio in early August. But it wasn’t until we met by chance in the field, after sunset on a long day, at the end of the parked cars that I thought, hm, there might actually be something to this piper’s flirting. And when he kissed me in the moonlight while his dogs—two collies, no less—played in the most dog-snortin’ happy way around us, I had to admit that maybe, just maybe, I should pay attention. But on the drive off site, after he’d walked me to my car, I realised, “This is the easy part. This may be the only time this man will make me uncomplicatedly happy.” And I started thinking about how maybe happiness isn’t a state: it’s these little, discrete pieces that you sometimes have to break apart from the rest of your life and just accept for what they are: these little rice-paper-wrapped moments that have, in their shadows, that skulking memento mori that given half a day, even half an hour, things can turn to empty boxes and crumpled paper in your hands.
The next day, I had to leave early to make it home by sundown for the pre-fast holiday
dinner. I took my leave of him by the empty End-Game Stage, and walked thoughtfully back across the red-and-yellow chessboard to get my things and leave. He’d kissed me again, briefly, but I still wasn’t sure what it all meant. I’ve read too much literature and kissed too many rogues to be an optimist about these things. It’s not my well-known Goth tendencies that automatically make me think the glass may be half-empty in these cases, though I’ll admit it’s usually full of something dire like absinthe.
As I drove east on the PA turnpike (a little faster than I should have been going, I’ll admit), I happened upon Garrison Keillor and a rebroadcast of A Prairie Home Companion from 2000. He has a way about him of starting with a meta-story hidden in tales of life in Minnesota—a theme that makes you see things you never saw in your own life, connections you never made, things that unexpectedly make you cry or laugh or just sit and stare with a dawning look of comprehension in your eyes.
This time around, he was relating how some of his fellow Minnesotans managed to escape the prairie to Pasadena—from whence this particular broadcast came—and found happiness in the sun, and how, ultimately, it made them miserable. Happiness, he said, makes you boring. It’s the unhappiness, the narrow escapes that make a life.
He related the anecdote of his little girl’s getting ill, and how she’d been sick for days with a nasty viral bug, until she went into convulsions and seized in his arms, twitching and stiff. And for three minutes, until paramedics arrived, the incident had him utterly terrorstruck. “It scorches a parent’s heart, and it makes a mark that will never, ever, ever go away.” he said. But then he went on.
“…These three minutes are a little jewel of happiness that I will carry for the rest of my life, and every parent knows this: every parent has these little jewels: the horror that turned out all right, the thing that could have been much worse, the bad dream that you wake up from. This is what happiness is made of. And any time you feel dissatisfied, you bring out this little gem, and you remember those three minutes, and you think about it.
“This is what we believe in Lake Woebegone: the thing that comes close, but does not actually kill you.”
And it suddenly struck me that this was the perfect corollary to what I’d spent the previous 20 hours mulling. Maybe it’s not just the bad thing that ends well that you have to save in its little box, but the good thing you know might turn to dust, the handsome musician in a blue and green kilt who will, in a few weeks, go back to Montana, or on to Scotland, or back to some other woman somewhere. I mean, it really is a more complicated version of a two-word motto: carpe diem. That doesn’t just mean “Seize the day.” It means, I’m now thinking, seize the minute, the second, every moment you’re happy. Treasure every good thing that happens and every time you find something that makes you laugh and every quirky detail that finds you unexpectedly jazzed and every small thing that makes you say, “Yeah. Rock on.” Because you just never know when you might find yourself not distraught or bereft of joy or anything so dramatic, but just simply dry, out of patience—when you find yourself staring out a window, thinking how brown and grey and flat and unmusical everything is. You never know when you’re going to be tired and bored and dissatisfied.
I’m not saying you shouldn’t actively strive to be happy. Nor am I pessimistically saying it’s impossible to be happy as a general state; on the contrary, I think that’s something for which you should always reach. I’m just saying you might not always get there every day. Life happens; you get detoured. So gather ye rosebuds while ye may. String them on dental floss and make necklaces out of them and deck yourself out in them. Treasure them. You never know when you’re going to come over the hill and find that piper walking down Guildsman’s Way and laughing with the chick who sells the brass roses.
Paper or pixels, going through old letters and writing and files is always a mixed bag. I found two pieces from '06 that I wrote that just made me cry: a private journal entry, a letter never sent. A naivete that just makes me ache. Old drafts, tickets, written snapshots of stranger days.
But I also came across a piece I wrote, oh, I don't know when. Years ago, now. I was thinking about it a few months ago, when I held Marble late one night and wondered if I could count the rest of my time with her in hours. (As I write this, she has given up on me in disgust for not giving her yet another full can of tuna today-- it would be her third? Fourth? and she'll get it, but not til later-- and is now sprawled across my shoes on the other side of the room, pretending not to see me, but waiting, waiting til I stand up.) I remembered I'd written this piece, and I remembered there was something in it I needed to reread, to be reminded of once again. But I couldn't find it til now.
So here it is, to remind me. And anyone else who might need it.
I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately about happiness. About what it really is, and what it means to be happy. It’s been a confluence of events, I think, starting a few weekends ago at the Pennsylvania Renaissance Faire, and pretentious overanalytic that I am, I’ve mulled it and simmered it in my brain quite a while now. It’s almost stew at this point, so I thought I’d share.
Faire, I should tell you, is something writ large on my heart. I love my week-job, don’t get me wrong, but faire is like swimming in cool, clear water—assuming my spontaneous growth of gills, of course. It’s something that’s a much bigger part of me than a conglomeration of smooth muscle and organ meats should be able to contain. This faire, any faire, is my home, and my comfort. I have a few things in my life that are like that, and I’m lucky for each and every one. I seem to feel and think more clearly there than anywhere else, and deeper things seem to happen to me there.
Late one Saturday evening, I went for an unexpected moonlight stroll with a handsome young man of my acquaintance. A piper, no less: with red hair and sparkling eyes and an open, plain, Montana way of speaking. We’ve known each other for years, and we’ve been at the same show every weekend since Ohio in early August. But it wasn’t until we met by chance in the field, after sunset on a long day, at the end of the parked cars that I thought, hm, there might actually be something to this piper’s flirting. And when he kissed me in the moonlight while his dogs—two collies, no less—played in the most dog-snortin’ happy way around us, I had to admit that maybe, just maybe, I should pay attention. But on the drive off site, after he’d walked me to my car, I realised, “This is the easy part. This may be the only time this man will make me uncomplicatedly happy.” And I started thinking about how maybe happiness isn’t a state: it’s these little, discrete pieces that you sometimes have to break apart from the rest of your life and just accept for what they are: these little rice-paper-wrapped moments that have, in their shadows, that skulking memento mori that given half a day, even half an hour, things can turn to empty boxes and crumpled paper in your hands.
The next day, I had to leave early to make it home by sundown for the pre-fast holiday
dinner. I took my leave of him by the empty End-Game Stage, and walked thoughtfully back across the red-and-yellow chessboard to get my things and leave. He’d kissed me again, briefly, but I still wasn’t sure what it all meant. I’ve read too much literature and kissed too many rogues to be an optimist about these things. It’s not my well-known Goth tendencies that automatically make me think the glass may be half-empty in these cases, though I’ll admit it’s usually full of something dire like absinthe.
As I drove east on the PA turnpike (a little faster than I should have been going, I’ll admit), I happened upon Garrison Keillor and a rebroadcast of A Prairie Home Companion from 2000. He has a way about him of starting with a meta-story hidden in tales of life in Minnesota—a theme that makes you see things you never saw in your own life, connections you never made, things that unexpectedly make you cry or laugh or just sit and stare with a dawning look of comprehension in your eyes.
This time around, he was relating how some of his fellow Minnesotans managed to escape the prairie to Pasadena—from whence this particular broadcast came—and found happiness in the sun, and how, ultimately, it made them miserable. Happiness, he said, makes you boring. It’s the unhappiness, the narrow escapes that make a life.
He related the anecdote of his little girl’s getting ill, and how she’d been sick for days with a nasty viral bug, until she went into convulsions and seized in his arms, twitching and stiff. And for three minutes, until paramedics arrived, the incident had him utterly terrorstruck. “It scorches a parent’s heart, and it makes a mark that will never, ever, ever go away.” he said. But then he went on.
“…These three minutes are a little jewel of happiness that I will carry for the rest of my life, and every parent knows this: every parent has these little jewels: the horror that turned out all right, the thing that could have been much worse, the bad dream that you wake up from. This is what happiness is made of. And any time you feel dissatisfied, you bring out this little gem, and you remember those three minutes, and you think about it.
“This is what we believe in Lake Woebegone: the thing that comes close, but does not actually kill you.”
And it suddenly struck me that this was the perfect corollary to what I’d spent the previous 20 hours mulling. Maybe it’s not just the bad thing that ends well that you have to save in its little box, but the good thing you know might turn to dust, the handsome musician in a blue and green kilt who will, in a few weeks, go back to Montana, or on to Scotland, or back to some other woman somewhere. I mean, it really is a more complicated version of a two-word motto: carpe diem. That doesn’t just mean “Seize the day.” It means, I’m now thinking, seize the minute, the second, every moment you’re happy. Treasure every good thing that happens and every time you find something that makes you laugh and every quirky detail that finds you unexpectedly jazzed and every small thing that makes you say, “Yeah. Rock on.” Because you just never know when you might find yourself not distraught or bereft of joy or anything so dramatic, but just simply dry, out of patience—when you find yourself staring out a window, thinking how brown and grey and flat and unmusical everything is. You never know when you’re going to be tired and bored and dissatisfied.
I’m not saying you shouldn’t actively strive to be happy. Nor am I pessimistically saying it’s impossible to be happy as a general state; on the contrary, I think that’s something for which you should always reach. I’m just saying you might not always get there every day. Life happens; you get detoured. So gather ye rosebuds while ye may. String them on dental floss and make necklaces out of them and deck yourself out in them. Treasure them. You never know when you’re going to come over the hill and find that piper walking down Guildsman’s Way and laughing with the chick who sells the brass roses.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2009-12-08 06:03 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-12-08 02:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-12-08 06:31 pm (UTC)And my own 'carpe diem' saying is one I use whenever someone is looking askance at me for being enthusiastically happy over some tiny thing: "When little things can make you happy, it's that much easier to *be* happy." So while sometimes I embarrass myself by a happy food dance (I bounce when I'm eating food that makes me happy), I still allow myself to *do* the happy food dance. :D
no subject
Date: 2009-12-08 10:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-12-08 10:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-12-08 10:08 pm (UTC)