My wife nudged me on the plane coming into O’hare as she handed me the Wall Street Journal. “Read this” she said, knowing I’d resonate with the theme of english-department prof Willard Spiegelman’s new book, Seven Pleasures: Essays On Ordinary Happiness. The review by Wes Davis stated that…
The author’s aim is to show that “an intelligent thoughtful happiness is possible.”
“He looks at everything around him with a careful reader’s interpretive style of perception, and he carries a reader’s bundle of vicarious memories into every experience, likening what he sees to scenes from books he has read.
…To the extent that he has a secret to happiness, it resides in slowing down enough to pay attention to what you might call the grammar of experience. When you take the time to examine the world around you, parsing what you see, hear and feel, Mr. Spiegelman likens the approach to the parsing of a sentence in Latin class, you find that the plainest occurrence is surprisingly rich.”
To which I can only add a hearty “amen” (as well as scores of paragraphs jotted over the years about garden insects, a certain slant of morning sun and the fragrance of summer air–and on and on and on…)
My sentences tend to come from nature and from my photographic landscapes and outdoor still images rather than from scenes or characters in books, but my claim is the same as Dr. Spielgelman’s–that, as I said in the author’s note to Slow Road Home:
“There are wonders all around. From our everyday lives, these familiar things may seem unremarkable to us. But in these precious instants in time, if we keep our eyes open and our hearts ready to know it, there is nothing ordinary.”
To celebrate the small and close at hand, to see and find joy in the unadorned and quiet moments of our own present places and times–these are legitimate and worthy goals for all of us.
We sing it: You can’t buy me love. The best things in life are free. And all the while, we’d come to believe that we can spend our way to happiness. We have been encouraged to do so from the highest office and by every talking corporate head.
But the unpredictability of tomorrow’s paycheck or retirement’s nest eggs have largely disabused us of that notion, and we’re coming to realize that we must make do with what we have at hand. And we have an abundance, really.
Ordinary happiness lives on, buried for so many in the deeper layers beneath smothering sediments of avarice and entitlement and flagrant consumerism. We simply must dig to find it perfectly preserved and capable of new life above ground.
In these perplexing economic times, the pendulum swings. We are changing our minds and hearts: give us the what is real, what is good for the planet and the soil and seas for the long term. Give us what comes from within our grasp–the locally created and grown, made and performed. We are starting to regain our vision for the goodness of the goods and relationships we already own as the blessings they are and have always been during our busy rush to lay up fantasy fortunes of one kind or another.
Out of the relative hardship of these times we are perhaps coming to think less of building bigger barns to store tomorrow’s imagined riches and more on how to be thankful for our daily bread; more about being rather than seeming. From this day on, we can grow to appreciate the wealth in our lives, to want what we have, and to be able to gratefully say out of our common grammar of experience that it is enough.
