One day in retrospect the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful.
That was my hope anyway. And in some ways it's true. I think when you're living a little close to the bone, everything it a bit heightened.
There was a great article in today's NYT that reminded me of that old quote. It's about happiness, basically -- how and where we find it in our lives. A couple of things really jumped out at me. In talking about a time in Mexico after a bad break-up, he says:
The fresh heartbreak was, in a sense, like being in a foreign country; everything seemed alien, brilliant and glinting. It was as if I’d been flayed, so that even the air hurt. When you’re that unhappy, any glimmer of beauty or consolation feels like running into an old friend abroad, or seeing mountaintops through smog.
There is something to that raw feeling of heartbreak. You're like an exposed nerve -- everything is felt more strongly. Also, some of my happiest times have been on vacations. I used to say, "I'm always happiest when I'm somewhere else." The newness, the freshness, the surprise.
And often my most interesting and memorable days are the first ones. Especially overseas. There's something about the haze of jetlag. You haven't really slept, first of all. You're thousands of miles away from where you were just a handful of hours ago. Often in a totally foreign place where they don't even speak your language. Those first days always have a sort of magical, mystical feel to them.
What it comes down to, he says, is this:
Maybe we mistakenly think we want “happiness,” which we tend to picture in very vague, soft-focus terms, when what we really crave is the harder-edged intensity of experience.
It's true -- my happiest moments are usually when I'm busiest. Focused, purposeful, engaged, involved.
Finally, he uses an excellent metaphor I've had stored in my senses for the longest time, waiting for the right outlet -- a story or a play or even an executive speech or just a lesson I might spout in a meeting or conversation. It's this visual phenomenon that you notice most when looking at the stars. We have a sort of "dead spot" at the dead center of our eye. On our lens or something. But I remember it from astronomy classes in college. If you want to see the faint cloud of the Pleiades star cluster, for instance, you can't look at it straight on. You have to move your gaze a bit to the edge before it becomes clear.
Anyway, I always thought that would make a great metaphor for something, like the thing we want or need isn't always the thing we have our mind set on. But this guy puts it best:
I suspect there is something inherently misguided and self-defeating and hopeless about any deliberate campaign to achieve happiness. Perhaps the reason we so often experience happiness only in hindsight, and that chasing it is such a fool’s errand, is that happiness isn’t a goal in itself but is only an aftereffect. It’s the consequence of having lived in the way that we’re supposed to — by which I don’t mean ethically correctly so much as just consciously, fully engaged in the business of living. In this respect it resembles averted vision, a phenomena familiar to backyard astronomers whereby, in order to pick out a very faint star, you have to let your gaze drift casually to the space just next to it; if you look directly at it, it vanishes. And it’s also true, come to think of it, that the only stars we ever see are not the “real” stars, those cataclysms taking place in the present, but always only the light of the untouchable past.
Sort of a twist on what John Lennon said:
Live is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans.
There's certainly a time and place for reflection and for pulling away and even stewing and wallowing. But things always seem to happen for me when I just get out there and engage myself. In whatever it is -- work, play, other.
Just do it.
0 comments:
Post a Comment