The discussion and blog post seemed to be synchronized. What is happiness? What brings comfort? Does it come with achieving your goals? Is it when you have acquired everything you ever wanted? Is it a daily ritual or habit? How do we keep that carrot dangling before us, so we continue to reach for our future, our happiness, and contentment?
I believe Anthony has a good hold on it.
I believe that happiness is all in the pursuit of…
Happiness cannot be the end game. No matter what you think, you will find that happiness is just beyond what you thought it was. Comfort is also an elusive concept. What is comfort? There are levels that can only be defined by the individual. Can too much comfort lead to laziness, slack thought, unhappiness? It is the striving that brings satisfaction.
This of course is, as they say, a first- world-problem. People in depressed, exploited, or poverty-ridden areas of the planet have a totally different view of happiness and comfort. Their comfort is taken in small bits, as is happiness. Having a full belly brings comfort and leads to happiness if a full belly is a rare thing not taken for granted. Food has always been in the immediate reach for me, so comfort is easily achieved. Sometimes food is happiness when an exceptional meal is planned and served.
I was blessed with a happy disposition, not something I work at, just a gift. My husband says it is because I have a very poor memory. I admit I do live without regret or longing for the past. I’m incapable of worrying about the future. That leads to an inability to plan ahead which can be very annoying to a spouse. I’m pretty much a today kind of girl.
Once when our marriage hit a bad patch, we were swirling down the drain headed for divorce after thirteen years. We went to my mother to tell her the news and prepare her for a different relationship with our family. We weren’t mad at each other – it was the times, the circumstances, and the expectations that caused a wedge. It was a matter of having achieved goals – a nice house in a beautiful neighborhood, two cars, three kids, two dogs, a great career – then looking around and saying, “Why am I not satisfied?” My mother in her misguided effort at support declared, “Ken, I know she is hard to live with, but you’ll never meet a happier person.” A backhanded endorsement of me if I’ve ever heard one. The divorce failed, we reconciled, and the rest is history. My happy disposition must have helped win the day. I’m certainly not any easier to live with.
The things that bring joy in my life are my relationships with my family and friends and even strangers. I love to meet people and hear their stories. Lives lived in many different ways, yet with so much in common as human beings. I never tire of learning about other people, other cultures, other places. My life is enriched by those discoveries. That is the carrot that keeps me moving forward.
Writing is another joy in my life. There are infinite ideas to explore, infinite memories to share, infinite stories to conjure. Words paint pictures. Words spark conversations. Words are a never-ending source of revelation.
What about you? What does happiness mean to you? What brings comfort?
My family moved into our home on Burns Avenue in the Riverside District of Wichita Kansas when I was three years old. It was an area between two rivers, the Little Arkansas and the Big Arkansas. The rivers were just a few blocks from us, one to the East and one to the West of our house. To the south, in the fork of the two rivers, is Riverside Park, less than two miles from our house. Our neighborhood was built prior to WWII. Our house, built in 1940, had grey asbestos shakes and white trim. It was about 900 sq. ft. with two bedrooms, one bathroom, and an unfinished basement. The detached garage was a few feet behind and to the side of the house. The entire neighborhood of homes had a tree-lined street with sidewalks. Behind our house was an alley and across the alley was a church. Sunday morning delivered raucous music, loud singing, and righteous preaching that we could hear from our backyard. Around the corner and down the block on another corner was an IGA grocery store. Across 18th Street from the IGA was a drugstore with a lunch counter where we could get ice cream sodas, a rare but delightful treat. In the other direction around the corner in the middle of the block was a tiny mom-and-pop grocery. The old man would soak toothpicks in cinnamon oil and keep them near the cash register. He gave them to neighborhood kids who stopped by on the way to or from school. We chewed on them as we walked. He also stocked the best penny candy.
One of my best friends moved into the house next door within a few months of our arrival. His name was Billy. He was my age and we hit it off, playing cowboys, hide and seek, and climbing my big backyard tree. My very best friend, Lois, lived two blocks away on Woodland Avenue. When we were five we all attended Woodland Elementary which was two blocks in the other direction from my house on Salina Avenue. John Marshall Jr. High was three blocks further south. I left after sixth grade and didn’t get to attend John Marshall.
My room was at the back of the house and had two windows. The wallpaper on my wall was white with bouquets of lavender posies and yellow ribbons. My bed resided between the windows and I could see the backyard and my tree. It was an enormous maple tree. I sometimes made a tent over my bed with the open side toward the window and would pretend I was camping.
As soon as I was big enough, I climbed into Old Maple’s comforting branches to spend hours daydreaming or reading. It was well over thirty feet tall and, for a couple of years, I needed help to get up to the fork in the trunk that enabled me to climb higher. I could go far out on the limber bottom branch where I straddled it and bounced, pretending I was riding a horse. Dad built a swing attached to the side of the garage – another place to think and dream.
Our house had arched doorways between rooms except the two bedrooms and the bathroom. In the hall that led to the bedrooms and bathroom was a niche in the wall for the telephone. The living room had a fireplace with a floor-to-ceiling bookcase notched in beside it. The dining room had French doors out to the back porch. The kitchen was long and narrow, and my mother painted it Chinese Red. A window over the sink looked out to the backyard. At the end of the kitchen was an alcove where stairs led to the basement. It also had a side door leading out to the driveway where a honeysuckle vine grew on a tall white trellis.
A story I remember about the phone in the hallway was when I was four, I went swimming with the fishes. My mother ran my bath with nice warm water and bubbles and, before I got in, the phone rang. She went into the hall to answer it and began a conversation with someone. I was buck naked, running around the house. I decided to have company in the tub so I climbed on my little red chair, I got my goldfish bowl from the top of my dresser and dumped the fish with their castle, green ceramic mermaid and algae figures, and shiny rocks into the tub and climbed in. I began chasing the fish around in the tub and Mom heard the commotion. She was not amused. The fish were removed along with their paraphernalia to their bowl with clean water. The tub was emptied and washed out. Then I was tubbed, and scrubbed, and put to bed. I don’t believe the fish lasted through the night.
Another story that involved the phone was when I was six. I refused to clean my room. I put up a tantrum about something that was important to me at the time. My mother was at her wit’s end to get me to comply or at least calm down. She tried threatening and yelling at the same level I did with no positive result. Finally, she became very very quiet. She went to the phone in the hall. She dialed a number. I watched from around the corner to see who she was calling – the police? my Dad? No, she called the Indians. She put her hand over the receiver and told me she was going to send me back to them since I was acting like them and wouldn’t mind her. I begged her to let me stay and promised to try to be a better girl. She relented and told them over the phone I wouldn’t be going to live with them, at least not that day.
The basement was where Mom’s washing machine resided. We had clotheslines in the backyard to hang clothes to dry. The brown and white hide of my Dad’s horse Knobby was slung over the top of a folding roll-away bed. I sometimes climbed atop it and with a broom stuck in the crevice for a horse head, I pretended to ride the range on my paint pony. To this day I don’t know why my dad had his old horse pelt at our house. I do remember Mom did not appreciate its sentimental value and when we moved from that house it was left behind – who knows where?
I remember a year when the waters of the rivers rose above flood stage. All the neighbors went to the riverbanks to put sandbags along the edges. Even with that precaution, our basement held a few feet of water. The heartbreaking loss for my mom was the letters she received from my dad when he was overseas in the war. He wrote daily and she saved them in bundles with ribbons around them stored in the basement – until the flood when all were lost.
I loved my house, my neighborhood, and my school. The kids played kick the can, hide and seek, cowboys and Indians, a form of baseball across the front yards and into the street all through the year. In summer we’d roller skate from one end of our block to the other. Of course, in the winter we had snowball fights. The neighbor across the street raised chickens and when he decided to make one or two into their dinner he would let us know. The kids would line up to watch him catch a chicken from the coop, lay its head on an old stump in his backyard, and chop its head off with one mighty blow of a sharp axe. Then he let it go and the body would run around the yard and eventually flop over. A bloodthirsty gang we were.
I was eleven when Dad announced he received a promotion, and we were packing up and moving to Seattle Washington. It meant that when fall rolled around I wouldn’t be able to go to John Marshall Jr. High with all my cronies. The promotion I ached for – to be in Junior High. I was devastated. Mom was elated. She did not like living in Wichita. She was from Denver, a big fashionable city. To her eyes, Wichita was a cow town in the midst of the prairie. She yearned for the more cosmopolitan environs of Seattle. I remember trying to strike a deal with them to stay with my great-grandparents on High Street instead of going to Seattle. They reminded me that even if I did stay behind, I wouldn’t be able to go to school with my friends because my great-grandparents lived across the river about two and a half miles away in a different district. I went with them and met my destiny in Seattle.
When I wake each day, I spend a few moments thanking God for another day and counting my blessings. Well, not every day. There are those days when I sling shot into the morning with six things to do before breakfast. But then I try to slow down, take a breath, and remember to be thankful. Thankful that I have six things to do and can do them. Also, I’m thankful that as a retiree I have the luxury of slower mornings.
On Saturday I walk five to seven miles on the trails through Vistoso Nature Preserve, a two-hundred-acre open space that borders our backyard. In every direction, I see the glorious mountain ranges that surround us. Their solid majesty guardian of our valley. I’m grateful for the beautiful Preserve where wildlife is abundant and free to roam. I am grateful they share their space with us, invaders in their world. Today a young coyote crossed the trail about twenty feet in front of me. She stopped on the other side, paused to look at me, and then ambled into the underbrush and trees. Within seconds she disappeared, as animals do, melding into her environment. A couple of miles later, two cavorting coyotes came to the edge of the trail from an open area, noted my presence, then played on chasing each other, leaping and disappearing into the tall grass. They looked like a couple of dolphins breaching from beneath the sea.
Bird song accompanied my walk. I felt I was being passed along from song to song, bird by bird. I’m not a birder so I couldn’t identify the avian varieties, but their songs were a lovely accompaniment to the walk. Rabbits, large and small, scampered alongside trails busy in their bunny ways. They would halt to give me a look, then go about their business.
I am grateful to be able to walk. A few years ago, I broke my ankle and had to have the shattered bones screwed and plated back together. I spent weeks on the sofa unable to take even a single step on my own. Thank God for Dr. Ty who did a wonderful job of putting Humpty Dumpty back together. I so looked forward to walking across the family room into the kitchen. But… Immediately upon healing, I broke the other ankle. Don’t ask. It’s a dumb story and one for another day. I believe God saw I had not learned the lesson He intended and decided I needed more time immobilized. So again, I had to have surgery and spend more time on the sofa unable to walk.
During that long recovery period, Ken would pack me into the car for little excursions to get me out of the house and lift my spirits. What it mostly did was make me jealous of people I saw walking. Such a simple thing. We learn as babies to stand on two legs and claim our freedom to get from one place to another on our own. I did not appreciate that freedom until suddenly I was anchored down for three months. I swore that once mobile I would walk every day and appreciate each step. I have and I do. My daily walks are one to four miles and each step is blessed.
Ken still accompanies me on daily walks for up to a mile. He cannot walk further right now but hopes to increase his mobility in the near future. I’m cheering him on as he works to improve. I’m grateful that he is making every effort.
Most Saturdays I walk with my friend Roxanne, but she has been away visiting her son in Oregon, so I go alone. When we walk together, we talk, talk, talk for two hours. We solve the problems of the world and a few of our own. When I walk alone, of course, I’m really not alone with all the critters in the Preserve or friends from the neighborhood I meet along the way. My time walking alone during the week is for quiet contemplation, writing poems in my head, thinking about situations a character in one of my stories faces, or sometimes listening to music or a book on my phone. I am grateful for all those opportunities – alone or with friends.
Haiku from today
Silly woodpecker Rapping on the metal pipe What is he thinking?
wonkagranny 