Urgent Happiness Insights and News from Chaos and Gratitude
Ch ch ch changes, turn and face the strange
As you may recall from my last letter, I and most of my little family got Covid last week; I’m still weak but starting to revive. This is good because we are in the midst of moving house, a Brooklyn to Brooklyn move. We found an apartment, yay!, got approved, hoorah!, and are now right in the middle of packing up an apartment we lived in for sixteen years, hooboy. We’d have moved already if the Covid hadn’t hit. It also kept one of the kids from what should have been their first week at Hunter.
I thought I’d write a little about happiness today, and will start by saying that you’re happy if you are not packing up a life of sixteen years and four people.
I’ve researched and written about happiness, but my expertise is certainly not because I am generally and easily happy, because I’m not. I mean, I’ve been diagnosed as depressed and it is a hot potato I keep trying to toss but which the universe keeps throwing back to me as if I’d lost it. Yet I have my happinesses and live by alighting upon them for as long as I can manage or must. (Mixed metaphors are the only ones I trust.)
One becomes an expert on the stone in one’s shoe. People who have never had a stone in their shoe don’t usually think to write a tract on Living Stone Free. That’s more likely authored by someone consistently challenged by such pebbles, who has worked some things out for herself.
One thing I’ve worked out is that just as a man drowning needs a hand more than he needs a wiki article on the breaststroke, happiness advice is best when it is coming out of the mouth of someone who cares about you.
Advice I’m thinking a lot about lately is about confidence. We tend to be as confident as our last fishing trip went, we are overly influenced by the most recent events. This is hackable, but takes much concentration. You can try to train yourself to see the bigger picture of your luck and capacities. It can work a bit.
To return to the interpersonal: the royal road to all the major kinds of happiness is to try to sell them to someone else. Life is change and change can be painful and reminding someone else to float and bowl and punch with the rolls, and think cold thoughts when it’s hot, is the fastest way to find yourself contented with your own ridiculous lot. Reminding someone else that difficult straits are a steady state but that it’s worth being grateful for what’s under your hat, will likely make you step lighter and grin to tip your cap.
Of course, the news has been heartbreaking, but as with the rest, at least we’re not alone with it.
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Stay healthy, stay with me, stay with us.
love,
Jennifer