On Happiness

(or not)

At a neighborhood gathering of about 40 women yesterday, a small group of us landed at the same oval table surrounded by our friend Louise’s lovely garden. Our plates were piled high with the homemade goodies you only get at a potluck: polenta with mozzarella and tomato, noodles in tangy Asian sauce, curried tofu on pilaf, brie wrapped in pastry, strawberries and pineapple chunks dunked in chocolate. The benches we sat on were too short for all of us, but we sat together anyway, crammed-in like sardines, grateful for proximity without masks or anxiety. Our conversation jumped around but settled for a few minutes on the question of happiness. Feeling the need to check in with this group of older women, none of whom I knew, I asked how everyone was doing in Covid’s wake. I was hoping for insight into others’ emotional health (because mine is up and down) but instead we talked about the physical impact of the pandemic: How often and how badly we’d caught the virus, how our family members had fared, whether we still worried when we traveled. Eventually we got to talking about happiness; how we arrive at it, whether we’re happier at 60, 70, or 80, or if we were happier at a younger age. There were two animated thirty-somethings sitting with us. We encouraged them to believe that life gets better – not necessarily easier, but better.

Earlier in the week at a poetry group meeting on zoom, four of us talked and wrote about happiness. It makes me wonder if everyone is thinking about happiness right now. There’s so much to be gloomy about these days. My friend Barb believes happiness is a choice. She’s able to tune things out, choose moment to moment how she wants to feel. I thinks she’s right about its being a choice, but I don’t often make that choice. I brood. Turn things over a million times, think about the implications, what it all means, what I want to say or not say about it. I just looked up the word ‘brood’ in the Oxford dictionary and learned something I didn’t know: to brood is to think deeply about something that makes one unhappy. I didn’t know that. I thought brooding was just thinking deeply. Does that mean that thinking deeply necessarily leads to unhappiness? I hope not! For me, thinking deeply is where I live; it’s where my work lives, where writing poetry or prose or lyrics live. I don’t know if I could write anything meaningful if I didn’t think about it for a while. It’s deeply satisfying for me when words finally fall into place after thinking about what I want to say for a long time. Days, weeks, years in the case of songs.

Ironically, I get a thrill out of writing off the cuff, and I love what all of us write in our poetry group every week. It’s spontaneous and alive; there isn’t time to brood. We start with a prompt at 4:00, write something in response for twenty-five minutes or so, then share what we’ve written. If there’s time, we talk about the issues that came up and give each other feedback before we sign off by 5:15. Last week, the prompt was a poem by Danielle Carne called, “How to Become a Happy Woman, E.G.” The prompt included suggestions about what you might write: What makes you happy? Reflect on the notion of ‘becoming’ vs ‘being’ happy, OR… maybe you know someone with the initials E.G…write about what you would say to him or her about happiness. And as always, write whatever you want. Here’s the poem I wrote, tweaked a bit this morning:

On the Best of Days

He asked,
Are you happy?
I said,
I don’t believe in happiness

Not the answer he was hoping for
Not true either

What I really wanted was a deeper conversation
about what happiness means

Because happiness is fleeting,
momentary, comes and goes

How dull life would be
if happiness were the status quo!

So no, I’m not happy as a rule
Nor do I aspire to be

That was what I wanted him to know

What makes me happy
are days when my knees don’t buckle as I descend the stairs
my hair looks like hair rather than a driving cap
my eyes aren’t goopy
and the sun is out

On the best of days
I play the piano unselfconsciously for hours
don’t even get up to pee
I write a poem or a story
without caring if it’s any good
see dew drops perched like jewels
on a tulip or a spider’s web

On the best of days
I like myself

On the best of days
I am content 

You can read Danielle Carne’s poem here.