I used to have an ongoing conversation, with an old crank I dated briefly before we friendzoned into a contentious state of casual simpatico, on the nature of human happiness. His take was a fairly Buddhist one with grumpy extremes, in that he regarded the impetus to stay positive and happy all the time as a simultaneously foolish and undignified.
“Humans were meant to suffer, Joseph,” he said, in his usual gruff tone. “We’re not meant to be stuck in dimwitted emotional California sunshine all our lives, grinning like idiots.”
“I don’t think that’s exactly how it works, though.” I said. “I’m happy most of the time.”
“You don’t look happy most of the time.”
“Well, I think my thermostat for what constitutes happy is set somewhere between contentment and quiet optimism. The giddy stuff is just the icing.”
The old crank rolled his eyes. This was a frequent rejoinder, and it, in its way, also made me happy.
The thing is, I am happy most of the time, with the aforementioned setting, but that doesn’t mean I trip lightly in a constant state of doe-eyed ecstasy. You can be happy and worry about the registration due date of your truck, the broken coil on the air conditioner, a complicated schedule for a get-together, a too-complicated calendar at work, and why the dishwasher isn’t cleaning things properly—those are the details, but when you work on a baseline of being generally satisfied with the nature of existence, it’s easy to drop in and out of frustrations, if only briefly, to notice the contemplative comfort within direct reach.
I was filling my $21 clear plastic pen built by German robots yesterday, and it’s a fiddly process that’s sometimes messy and sometimes incomplete, but when I finished, I capped my inkwell, screwed the pen back together, and wrote “This ink is green.” Then, I just held it there, noting how well-shaped it is for my hand, and how the balance suits me nicely, and how smooth it is on the page. Pen hobbyists would call this “an okay starter pen,” but I’d say to them “Why would I need a ‘nicer’ pen when this one suits my needs? What’s the upgrade?”
In fact, I feel like, if I’m able to avoid losing or breaking this pen and I live as long as my mother has so far, it will have cost me 64 cents a year, or around two-tenths of a cent per day by the time my worldly goods are being distributed to the folks that want them. Huh. That’s a pretty neat thing. And hey, what a technological wonder this old-fashioned pen is, compared to having to dip a quill in ink every few lines and write on scratchy pre-industrial paper, or to press a stylus into clay or hammer text into a rock. What wonders we have around us that we barely notice!
I guess, in my way, I’ve slowly trained myself to notice, or to at least be receptive to noticing such things in the little empty spaces one finds between tasks and obligations. I was lucky, I suppose, in lacking the resources to fill all those times with consumption, entertainment, and distractions, but that, too, is something to notice.
I’ve been irritated by my eyeglasses quite a bit recently, having gone from wearing no glasses for decades where I actually needed them but didn’t know to my most recent state, where I have distance glasses and prescription reading glasses and I’m forever having to swap glasses as I move around the home and workspace, and boy, is it an annoyance. So now I’m trying out a pair of progressive lenses, and I’m struggling to adapt, as they give me a feeling of visual unsteadiness that’s somewhere between vertiginous and the way old movies used to simulate the perspective of someone strung out on LSD, where everything’s shifting and rolling and fuzzy and not-fuzzy and entirely nonlinear, and ow ow ow, my eyes.
Again, though—all the frustration of this pales in comparison to a long, sad stretch where I was convinced I’d fallen out of love with reading, because without my prescription reading glasses (and drugstore readers didn’t help, because my eyes are out of sync, magnification-wise), reading was a squinty headache and I’d usually try, then give up in frustration. With a better job and better health insurance, I decided to hit the optometrist for a review of my vision…and prescription reading glasses are a miracle. Sure, they’re a fussy, obnoxious miracle that requires a lot of handling, and I manage to scratch mine constantly, despite care, but I can read again, albeit with some ongoing retraining, since I’ve let the internet steal my attention and train me to be in a state of fidgety instability, where I’m itching to keep moving all the time, and that’s not optimal.
But I believe what Umberto Eco had to say about the advent of eyeglasses and how they helped to enable the renaissance by extending the productive years of scholars, so they wouldn’t lose their ability to read just as they were coming into their wisdom. Maybe glasses and all the annoyances they bring are the price to be paid for me to keep moving, keep reading and writing, and keep advancing into later middle age.
The thought makes me smile, and there it is. That setpoint on where contentment lies, where I don’t have to grin like an idiot, but can quietly accept and enjoy the miracles that are all around me in this year and that weren’t there for people a hundred years ago, or a thousand. What a world of subtle wonders!
“You don’t look happy,” some will say, as I’m puzzling out a tapestry of little annoyances and big frustrations, and sure, maybe I’m not smiling all the time, but the joy is always just in reach, as close as a pen or my scratched-up glasses that slide down my nose even as they invite me to remain in a state of never-ending learning.
It is sufficient, and sufficient is enough.
© 2024 Joe B. Wall