Happiness
La Primavera (Spring) by Sandro Botticelli
It is the middle of summer, the heart of the watermelon, and I'm sitting on a patio looking out at hills and cypress trees and listening to people splashing in a pool I'll swim in later on. There are people in that pool murmuring in languages I don't speak, but I can tell they're happy. So am I--it would take an act of will not to be.
How does happiness happen? How does it happen to me? Do I need a pool and a patio and a white butterfly and just the right combination of breeze and Italian to strum the strings of my soul's harp? Surely not! Maybe not. Um ....
Happiness comes and goes, and that's OK with me. To poach a phrase from Wallace Stevens in "Sunday Morning," I have no desire to live in a paradise where ripe fruit never falls. Happiness can and should be pursued, but sometimes the pursuit feels like an endless game of tag with Usain Bolt. On days like that, it's better to leave Usain alone and just do your work, whatever that might be. If you don't have any work, find some: mow the grass, change the litter box. Floss, whatever.
Often happiness is a remedy, a balm, a way out. And the balm, the escapism of it, can become a problem if you fixate on it. As a longtime student of the Beat Generation authors, many of whom played around endlessly with heroin and cocaine and blah, Benzedrine, blah, I've always prided myself on my complete disinterest in narcotics. Chocolate and/or wine will almost always suffice on good days and bad, thank you very much. But when I landed in the ER back in February, I was happy to make the acquaintance of morphine. I remember our one-night stand with great fondness. But: never again, if I can help it.
Happiness can bring tears, as it did two days ago when I stood at just the right place in the Uffizi Gallery and looked at Botticelli's The Birth of Venus and then at his Spring. There were hoards of tourists milling around me, but it was my moment nonetheless. I felt very large and very small at the same time. Maybe what happened to me in the Uffizi was not exactly the onset of happiness; maybe it was the pure joy of being human. And that is pretty damned good.
There was a time when doctors prescribed travel to people feeling melancholy. Why don't they do that anymore? Why don't they say, "Go on a trip, you slug-a-bed. Go to a museum in some place you've never been." Even a trip to the next town over can pump up the dopamine. Or, if you are really, really depressed and unable to go far, take a stroll down the familiar aisles of Food Lion--or your own, fall-back supermarket. Just go.
In any case, here we all are--alive and breathing the air that inspirited saints and geniuses and rotten criminals and cats and dogs and rats for more centuries than I care to count. We must make something of this air, this day! If you hear a splash, that's me!