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What a beautiful morning. The green trees stand serene around the almost motionless meadow. The single white cloud in the blue sky seems brushed there by a painter testing his palette. The still air somehow realizes it's Sunday of Memorial Day weekend: fewer tasks, an extra hour to sleep in, the beginning of summer.
How did summer earn a reputation for laziness? For nature, in these parts, winter is the somnolent season. During summer, plants leaf, blossom, reach upward toward the sun. Folks are busy too, going places in the sunshine, playing games. Maybe it's those lounging days at the beach or the three months' absence of homework that resulted in summer's slander.
I am happy. This sentiment is less frequently uttered than its opposite. Discontent fuels conversations. Listen in any public place. Traffic, the babysitter, weather (too hot, cold, rainy), non-compliant kids, bad meals, worse waiters, groans, kvetches, constitute the core ingredient of casual banter. We outdo one another with dyspepsia. Aches and pains. How often do we overhear jubilation "Wonderful, wonderful, I am thrilled, this is the best!"?
Partly, joy is a more taxing topic than travails. A happy story soon grows tedious. Stories need tension difficulties, villains, dangers to seize our attention.
Joy also strikes hearers as a kind of boasting. Whenever I dare to say in public that I'm happy, I sense listeners bristling, as if I were flaunting privilege. It's like saying "I'm rich." Complaining is less aggressive, more polite. "I may seem happy," a complaint implies, "but really I've got my troubles too. I'm just as unlucky as the next guy."
So, mostly, not to rub people wrong, I keep my contentment quiet. And truly, it does seem unfair that I should be so happy when so many others aren't. I wish they were. They could be, I keep thinking, if they changed how they viewed things. The glass that's half empty is also half full. But that's their business. The only people whose outlook I sometimes attempt to adjust are my kids and Jane, and it never works.
One challenge of happiness is that it's obstreperous. It wants to express itself but in a nice way. So we find ourselves bellowing songs in the shower or whistling or laughing for no good reason. We skip sometimes. We may pluck a leaf and twirl it. We hug harder anything to signal our gratitude without proclaiming it. Happiness knows it is lucky. Happiness knows dark hours lurk. As light cannot be light without dark, happiness cannot be happiness without gloom. This is why happiness is often succeeded by melancholy. We are happy but oh! we won't be happy forever. The inevitable evanescence of our mood nay, our entire existence makes us sad.
Happiness not only wants to express itself it wants to thank somebody. God would be a logical candidate, if you follow the chain of responsibility back to its source. But for me he or she is too vague a vision, too distant. It's a little like thanking an old uncle who's deaf and has dementia. My thanks do not get through, somehow.
So instead of sending a thank-you letter, I sing in the shower or write paragraphs, which is much the same thing. Younger, I believed people wrote to say something. Sometimes they do. But the best writing, the sort we label literature, is really just singing in the shower, the expression of a response to the experience of life. We write or paint or sing or mold pots or weave or dance or gun our new car or bake a rhubarb pie not to achieve any practical objective but to express ourselves, to hint what's in our hearts. We create because we're grateful and we're not sure who to thank.
Emotionally, there is no distinction between an author and a child who trips into the garden and plucks petals to bring home. "Look, what I found, Mommy, look, how pretty!" That's what an author is saying when he presses to your astonished nose his bouquet of sounds.
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