#27. Happiness (More or Less).
Who deals it and how to get some.
To Whomsoever It May Concern,
The last few months in my life have been -
It didn’t help that I had embarked on a heavy journey here on Substack (my happy place) with a personal essay on Feminism. I’d set that ball rolling in more spacious days but having made a commitment to myself - and to you - I knew I had to finish what I started.
As I did so, my ‘usually weekly’ post dwindled to once in ten days, sometimes more. The fifth and last part came after a break of a month. I heard what They said: to grow a readership, consistency is everything - people like to know what to expect. I get it. Life is full of (often unpleasant) surprises, and Art should fill the gap. But to post like a machine, you have to become one, and I am no Spinning Jenny.
Though the writing of the Feminism essay had started out a gushing river, exuberant and plentiful, it had ended up a bore well: an extraction, hard labour. I am no ChatGPT, and you, Dear Reader, are no garbage can. Every weft and weave was shot with blood, sweat and fear. Fear of my own opinions, fear of other people’s opinions. Fear of being cancelled. Of being wrong, of doing wrong.
But I bobbled through and finally, it was over. I was glad I did it, and even more glad that it was done. As I pushed ‘send’ on the fifth and last part, some of the heaviness I had been feeling lifted, and I was reminded of a quote I read as a young child in a pithy volume on my parent’s bookshelf called ‘Writers On Writing’:
I love being a writer. What I can't stand is the paperwork.
-Peter De Vries
I hadn’t a clue who Peter De Vries was (‘Twas the Night Before the Internet), but I understood what he meant. I didn’t like difficult things. I liked things that came easily and brought large uncomplicated servings of joy: turning cartwheels, running with dogs, baking cakes. My spirit animal was a pond skater - I liked to stay on the surface, tipping my hat at my own reflection, staying out of dark depths.
“Could do better”, “Shows potential” and once, “hides her light under a bushel” said my report card. My vocabulary limited, I had to look up ‘bushel’. This took effort. But now I knew: Bushel - 1. [countable] a unit for measuring grain and fruit {equal in volume to 8 gallons} bushels 2. [plural] bushel - of something - {North American English, informal} a large amount of something.
Mother, worried I would remain a dunce, in a desperate scrabble presented me with three short novels. One of the titles I cannot remember - obviously, it made no impression. The other two stopped me in my tracks: To Sir With Love by E. R. Braithwaite and Love Story by Erich Segal. A clever move on her part: I was at thirteen, a hopeless romantic with a tiny attention span and serious issues with authority. I was hooked.
Reading was no longer a ball and chain, it was a ticket to ride. The stories took me out of myself, out of the stranglehold of school and the loneliness of the crowd. Around this time - I am not sure if was a coup - my mother’s best friend presented me with a diary with a lock and key and a picture of a cat on it. At first, I wrote badly. The entries were affected, clumsy. But soon I learned to stop bullshitting myself, to dig a bit deeper, and I received a reward. Reading and writing helped me make sense of the world, of my feelings, of what to do with Time. It made Order from Chaos, and I learned: To Keep It Together, to make something of Life - would take some work. But it was worth it.
Things Fall Apart. Because things want to fall apart. Entropy is Nature’s Way. There will be war and death and illness and suffering. We can’t Benjamin Button ourselves, or the people we love. Everything - everyone - gotta go. “Time flies like an arrow”, but also, “Fruit flies like a banana”. Life is heavy. Art is transcendent. While we clutch our co-pasengers on this one-way journey to Oblivion, we can rage against the dying of the light. And we will find plenty of shiny things in the swill bucket: a poem, a performance, an exhibition or a song heard on the radio in 1998. We could even make shiny things for ourselves. I often see a sparkle knee-deep in dung. I am a lucky man!
Anyone can be one.
“Happiness, more or less… It's just a change in me, something in my liberty… But how many corners do I have to turn? How many times do I have to learn? All the love I have is in my mind..." ~ Lucky Man, The Verve, 1997. 🎶
I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, 'If this isn't nice, I don't know what is’.
– Kurt Vonnegut, from "Knowing What's Nice", an essay from "In These Times," 2003.
The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become. Conversely, the absolute absence of burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant. What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness?
– Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being.
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Writing and the Art of Mental Maintenance!