I've been happy in myself for quite a while now. It's so nice!
Some of the happiness comes from an awareness of the cessation of pain. If you erase pain, sometimes a baseline of happiness is revealed, right?
But sometimes, as I learned on Camino, happiness exists even despite flayed feet.
Yes, but still, it's extra-nice when pains actually GO AWAY. Some pains of mine that I'm grateful were relieved:
A couple years ago,
I had a tooth removed that had caused low-level consistent infection for years, and I've felt slightly better in my body since, making me wonder if it'd been draining my energy for a long time;
Last summer,
I moved to this, my very own, Apartment 320, after three years of living with Housemate whose severe & persistent mental illness was challenging--through the hard times of Covid isolation, George Floyd's murder, and the Attack on the US Capitol;
And a couple months ago,
I got off Instagram (was already off FB). I liked it, but it agitated me in a not-happy way-- I'm surprised, but I feel actively happier without it.
Oh--and this spring,
I gave up trying to be in any way friends with Big Boss--and that turned out to be a boost--like inflating a bike tire to the right pressure--and it leaves me with meaningful work.
It also doesn't hurt that this summer hasn't been miserably hot (yet?).
I keep saying, "THIS is what I learned on Camino", but this question that occurred to me one day truly was a revelation. I wrote it down on July 20, 2001, Day 14:
"Is it possible that happiness is the baseline of existence? When everything else is removed?"(I meant despite or underneath everything else— not that everything else must cease—I wondered this because I was happy despite excruciating foot pain.)
"Porque non?" Why not?
At the same time, this summer I've been sad.
I miss all the old people who knew me when I was young--including ones I wasn't close to--the aunts and uncles, neighbors, friends of my parents––even ones I didn't particularly like––they were there.
And now they're not.
Most of us here are old enough to recognize this sadness,
I expect. There's nothing wrong--that's how life goes. The older ones go on ahead, and out of sight, and we are left. And people our age are not guaranteed to stick around either…
It surprises me how much I miss the old ones sometimes––not the front-and-center ones––it’s no surprise that I miss my parents and Auntie Vi––but the ones on the edges of my life.
My Missouri grandmother's distant relatives, who would come sit on the back porch and chat when my mother took us down to visit. They had the most wonderful, old fashioned names: Fern, Jewel, Olive, Maude...
On my father's side, I even miss Uncle Larry (Lorenzo) in his black socks with sandals and his unwelcome wet kisses, making huge vats of sugu (spaghetti sauce) for my grandmother's birthdays.
Oh, my. But sadness doesn't mean you can't be happy. The feelings are not contradictory, they're... maybe even complimentary, like layers of a Jell-O parfait.
I'm happy, too, that I'm in general good health--I'm old enough to count the absence of pain and illness as an active happiness. The changes in my aging body are a little shocking sometimes--they've piled on fast, the past couple years since I turned sixty. But they're mostly painless.
I look at the crepey skin on my arms and think, "This vessel is wearing down."
I guess that does make me sad. One day I will have to leave...
But meanwhile, an excellent thing about being old: I'm free to DO WHAT I LIKE! Isn't it nice to be a grown-up?
Here's something I like to do a lot--below. I took this photo because I'd changed chairs, and when I put my feet up on the ottoman, a pile of books slid to the floor. That made me laugh--what bounty! To be surrounded by piles of books I've chosen.
{Imagine girlettes and toys on the bookshelves to the left, because they are there and they are an active happiness too.}
I dip in and out of books. I'm reading a chapter, here and there, of Gerald Durrell's My Family and Other Animals. It's one of my Childhood Re-Reads: my own family had taken turns reading it out loud when I was eleven, and I remember dying of laughter.
Now it is mildly amusing.
I did read all of the novel on my lap, Past Imperfect (2009). It's by Julian Fellowes, who wrote the screenplay to Gosford Park, (dir. Robert Altman), which I'd liked, and he created Downton Abbey, which I watched all of one episode of. I don't much like TV shows that go on and on.
Anyway, this novel was interesting, in ways--it's about an old man (an unnamed a stand-in for Fellowes) looking up some upper middle class or aristocratic people with whom he'd socialized as a young man during one Social Season (like deb balls) in 1968.
He muses on how society has changed since then in an interesting but sometimes blinkered and rather pompous way.
For instance, an old girlfriend tells him [the Fellowes stand-in] that her now aged father came out as gay in his mid-years.
Fellowes muses that it's good for society to offer dignity and full participation to people of all sexual tastes, but--that old chestnut--"why do they have to go on about it?"
Buddy, your ENTIRE book is about the mating rituals of heterosexuals and your unrequited longing for a particular woman. Who is going on (and on) about their sexuality?
You are, and you can't even see it.
This lack of imagination hampers the book's ending too. You figure from the start that there's a twist coming, but when it arrives, it's a real let down, along the lines of:
surprise, all along the fruit in your unopened lunch bag was an apple, not an orange.
Clunk.
I'm disappointed so far in The End of Your Life Book Club too, but I love the idea of it--a son and his mother who has cancer read books together in the last couple years of her life. It's way too much of a personal love-song to the author's mother-- "Mom was so wonderful." Nice for him, but boring.
It reminds me of a funeral I went to recently. Of course a funeral is not a book for strangers! it's for people who knew the dead woman. But the eulogies could have been copied off the Internet and any name inserted.
"She had a radiant smile, and she was the most loving daughter, wife and mother."
Please say something else about me when I'm dead, okay?
"Mygod, she was so critical. She even complained about strangers' funerals!"
LOL
Oh--one more thing: I'm happy that Marz is walking Camino! I'd mentioned meeting up with other Star Trek friends on Camino 2011--I think I've posted this photo several times? But here we are, almost to Finisterre on the Atlantic, stopping to put on rain gear:
I'm second from left, Marz is center.
