Happiness Doesn’t Hit
I don’t mean to pick a fight with Florence + The Machine and I love the song, but I don’t agree that happiness hits you like a train on the track. It’s way sneakier than that. It doesn’t have a timetable or announce its approach, and it doesn’t follow set pathways. We go looking for it on vacations and at celebrations and sometimes this works, but often it doesn’t (at least not in any way commensurate with the hassle and expense involved in setting them up).
The last time happiness flooded over me I was at home on a Saturday morning, hooking up a new receiver for my AV gear. There was nothing at all remarkable about the day or the task, but my life circumstance and neurochemistry nonetheless got on the same page and decided to throw me a little party (unaided by pharmacology, I want to stress). A strange euphoria came over me and stayed for a while. I don’t have any other label for the feeling except happiness. I didn’t ask for it and surely wasn’t expecting it, but was appreciative as Hell.
The poet Jane Kenyon knew something about happiness, in large part because of its absence. She had a brutal lifelong fight with depression, which she chronicled in “Having it Out With Melancholy.” It’s one of the most devastating things I’ve ever read, conveying just how horrible and hopeless chronic depression is.
So when I came across a poem by her titled simply “Happiness,” I was thrilled. Both that she herself found some, and that she’d be able to put the emotion into words to the benefit of the rest of us.
Which she does. The poem is about how happiness comes unexpectedly, and also about how it comes to everyone. To drive this latter point home, she ends with a litany:
It comes to the monk in his cell.
It comes to the woman sweeping the street
with a birch broom, to the child
whose mother has passed out from drink.
It comes to the lover, to the dog chewing
a sock, to the pusher, to the basket maker,
and to the clerk stacking cans of carrots
in the night.
It even comes to the boulder
in the perpetual shade of pine barrens,
to rain falling on the open sea,
to the wineglass, weary of holding wine.
I read poetry in the hope of coming across lines that powerful, and of gaining some insight into how the world works as we’re working our way through it. I’m grateful to Kenyon for teaching me something about both the highs and lows of our emotional lives, and wish she were still with us (she died of cancer in 1995).
When did happiness last come to you? Was it at a time and place you expected, or more like stacking cans of carrots in the night, or hooking up a stereo on a Saturday morning?
