How to Be Happy-ish
“He was still too young to know that the heart's memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good, and that thanks to this artifice we manage to endure the burden of the past.” –Gabriel García Márquez
Years ago, living in a Buddhist monastery that practiced Rinzai Zen as a semi-committed sort of Buddhist-artist-in-residence I had a moment of what could only be described as pure happiness. I was walking down the hill to the temple about to enter the zendo for our evening practice, the sun was setting, my companion was silent, and my shoulders were finally unhunched. This happiness struck me as ridiculous as I was sore, exhausted, and freaked out. They gonged you awake at 4:30 am, we had to eat things like rice with chopsticks and perform a food ballet with bowls, one bowl for each food, bowls washed at the table and rewrapped, all done at warp speed, wrapped in a linen square and the wooden clapper told you to scurry away even if you had barely eaten. We sat for a full day, a break every hour for walking meditation, sat late, sat with moonlight slashing the polished floor of the zendo into rectangles. I had polished that floor.
In the moment, I was miserable, angry, sad to think that this sexy, New York writer had to flee to the Catskills to hang out with monks, their head shaved, voices harsh in order to seek respite from grief. A month after I returned to New York City, all I recalled was the sweetness of giggling during yoga, the smell of the woods, the release of standing after hours of zazen. Instead of an accurate memory of the cold mornings, coffee deprivation, failure to manage my bowls, a constant sense of failure, I remembered pure peace, happiness, serenity.
Since last March, we have suffered. Some have suffered the most; health care workers, the friends and family of those ill with Covid, or dying. Restaurants and small businesses have been deeply impacted, rituals like weddings, graduations, memorials have been cancelled, schools and universities online, failing to engage, the Zoom replacement failing to compensate for what we formerly took for granted, physical presence, the intimacy of hand holding, the sweetness of a hug. It’s been terrible but lest we forget, things have been terrible before and then wonderful, but terrible again. You may even have missed the happy time because, well, happiness is weird and somewhat awful.
I associate happiness with loss. Maybe it’s those lapsed Catholic genes waking up in my body, or my inability to exist in the present but somehow my mind goes to that moment when the party is over, the birthday passed, the excitement over your book, your baby, your wedding disappears and the contrast with normal life feels unbearable. What this really means is you have been given grace, the opportunity to feel elation and gratitude and pride. Why we see this existence as normal is part of the problem, a reason the monks constantly invoked attachment and warned that it would result in pain. “But I’m attached,” I wailed. “I’m attached to my parents, my boyfriends, my apartment, my writing, total strangers, the homeless man who lives on the grate outside my apartment building.” The monks shrugged and advised me to sit and to polish more wood.
Part of what makes this present moment so hard for those of us who haven’t actually lost our homes to fire, unemployment, or hurricane, who haven’t had a loved person get sick with this mystery virus, virulent enough to eliminate the chance to comfort or say goodbye is finding space to acknowledge loss, loss of friends, jobs, movies, rituals, work. Grief morphs into anger, anger brings shame or acting out and all the time we are comparing our current lives to the past, a past that never existed, a past composed of sweetness and light, no shadows, nothing to regret.
photo by Kasturi Roy
If we admit happiness is an illusion, a bubble, a dream, basically gone before it is actually experienced because it’s never that unflawed, smooth, and rose-tinged we can accept this current moment. Childbirth has its moments but there are also long stretches of intense pain and rage at your stupid partner who is sucking down a sandwich while you are screaming obscenities and Enya won’t stop chanting, “Sail Away.” Love is a many splendored thing, but it includes the reality of your partner’s selfishness and inability to cook a single meal. The dream, a book deal with a huge publisher, had triumphant moments but these were accompanied by empty reading events, negative reviews, fear of success, fear of failure, fear.
Memories of happiness are nice to have but in this moment; this time of economic crisis and a health threat that has paralyzed the world, go outside, move through space, masked, of course, be grateful for your ability to walk, to see, to smell the air and know these things are real. I am writing postcards to the elderly which feels dull and stupid but this, small as it is, is something.
—Molly Moynahan, author and writing coach