Ah, life. Reads the last line to one of Kurt Vonnegut’s dismal short stories. In the story, a random, wonderful thing (the birth of a baby) becomes a random, horrible thing (the baby dies) for an everyday couple. The couple goes on to accept their fate, the world regards their misfortune as too bad, and the couple resumes the days of their lives as best they can.
I depend on Vonnegut’s two words with the little comma between them, whenever life tilts, then tumbles into misfortune—the kinds of misfortunes that don’t come with happy endings or silver linings or brighter sides.
Ah, Life.
Who better than Vonnegut to write, with his unfairly wounded heart, those words as the final answer to a sad story? He had experienced the WWII bombing of Dresden, Germany while hunkered down in a slaughterhouse as a POW. He lived to deal with what he had witnessed and what he had been ordered to do with the carnage. And, as if an experience of war wasn’t enough, Vonnegut never escaped burdens of personal tragedy and heartache on his home fronts. On top of everything, he was afflicted with PTSD and depression.
And so it goes. (KV, also.)
And so it does go. For a lot of us. Sometimes it feels as though we can’t bear to shed another tear or expend another ounce of energy to keep our hearts pumping through the adverse challenges of illness, relationships, addiction, responsibility.
Ah, the heart. So high maintenance! Mine soldiered on and on through 2016. It soared; it crashed; it held the line. By year’s end, the Holiday Blues were getting the best of me until one day in December when I heard a simple story that blindsided my weary heart with happiness. In fact, I needed to give myself a happiness time out when I heard the story—just a minute or two—when I gave myself permission to stop and feel really happy because something good had come to light. The feeling wasn’t going to last forever, I knew that. It was only a moment of grace.
But what an amazing grace it was.
Because as much as bad news and the blues can drag me into my own slaughterhouses of self-loathing and self-destruction, good news can make the sun blaze a smiley face tattoo all the way through my thick skull and onto my parietal lobe where science claims human happiness gets juiced. According to contemporary maps of the human brain, the parietal lobe sits behind the frontal lobe which, in my life, too often gets used as a hammer—to pound stakes through my heart.
Heart, soul, brain, belly—wherever it is that happiness hangs out, it’s always good to welcome the spirit when it comes to abide.
Here’s Vonnegut on feeling happy:
“I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, ‘If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.'”
Vonnegut’s words aren’t earth shattering unless you know a little bit about the man voicing them. Or unless you, yourself, can recall your own descents and/or relapses into the pits of grief and despair. One never forgets how hope becomes the most amazing grace when the darkness begins to fade—how one sighs, then breathes again—murmuring a happy prayer of relief and gratitude: If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.
Maybe we don’t really know what nice happiness feels like anymore. Many of us live in worlds tilted off balance—worlds where getting juiced with what we think is happiness is triggered by pings emanating from electronic devices which are often followed by pangs—of bewildering angst. Soon, an addiction to fake happiness develops. Desires for instant and constant and big-bling gratification become crippling. Useless emotions like jealousy or envy arise to ruin the day. The little things in life no longer delight us—little things that are actually the beautiful and surprising blooms from seeds we planted long ago and never stopped tending.
As I mentioned a few paragraphs ago, I was surprised by a nice story this year. The story was real, not fake. I received a genuine boost to my spirits—on all fronts—when the story came to me.
Let’s see if I can tell about it:
So. Once upon a time. This year. A week before Thanksgiving. My father saved my mother’s life. Mom was sitting in her wheelchair watching the news on a morning when Dad had decided not to go to the gym. Dad heard Mom utter an unfamiliar gasp. He sprang from the breakfast table. He called out to her. No response. He searched for a pulse. None. He began CPR. He dialed 911. He resumed CPR. The medics recharged Mom’s heart with a defibrillator. They rushed her to one hospital where she was then airlifted to another hospital. For several days, Mom was confined to the ICU as she entered into the brave new world of medically-induced hypothermia. Her body was cooled to preserve brain function by, hopefully, reducing the number of brain cells damaged due to loss of oxygen when Mom suffered sudden cardiac arrest. Basically, Mom was sort of safely frozen.
A big freeze descended on all of us as we waited to see whether or not Mom would survive, and, if she did survive, would her mental abilities be as sharp as they were before the sudden cardiac arrest which had caused loss of oxygen to her brain?
It was a dreadful experience. Over a few days, Mom’s body temperature was slowly restored and we encouraged her as she struggled to get her mind to achieve its baseline.
It’s hard to determine the exact moment of miraculous intervention which helped Mom’s perky mind thaw out as well as we could have hoped. It was definitely a team effort between Heaven and Earth. But it also might have been this: Dad’s CPR broke Mom’s ribs. He got through to her heart and kept it pumping when it mattered the most. (And Dad has his own health challenges. And Mom is paralyzed on her left side. So I have to wonder if some strong guardian angels came to the aid of my parents until the medics arrived. Maybe one of those angels went by the name of Cupid.)
During the longest days of panic, exhaustion, and worry, my sister and I were talking and suddenly remembered it was Christmastime. She told me she was going to order a wreath from a local flower shop where Dad lived and have them deliver it and hang it on his door.
Dad was home when the delivery arrived. The doorbell rang, he opened the door, and there stood a man with a wreath. The man said: “Do you remember me?” At first, Dad didn’t recognize the man, but as soon as the man introduced himself, Dad remembered him for sure.
It had been many years ago. Back in the days when Mom and Dad hauled their family of seven children from Indiana to Arizona to Connecticut, always on the move for better opportunities. In Connecticut (the family’s final frontier) Mom and Dad worked several jobs. Dad was an executive and Mom was a real estate broker. In their spare time (:D) they bought, restored, and sold homes. Mom and Dad spent many late nights and long weekends ripping apart, hammering together, and fluffing up neglected properties. They poured their hearts and souls into the homes they renovated.
One of those homes—we call it the Ironworks House—came to them unkempt with overgrown landscapes, cars and tools rusting away in side yards, and a neglected pool. It took Mom and Dad a year to renovate that house. While they worked, people watched the transformation. One evening, a man out walking stopped in to talk to Dad while Dad was working on the Ironworks House. Dad was installing a new wall that night. There was no time for breaks so Dad kept working and while he worked he explained to his visitor, through real time demonstrations and detailed explanations, how to build a wall The Right Way.
Whenever my parents completed a house renovation project, they acted just like any other great team of artists—proud and unsure about whether or not they really wanted to sell their beautiful work. But, my parents knew what it meant to have a family in a happy home and it gave them a great deal of satisfaction to match their homes with the right buyers.
When it came time to sell the Ironworks House, Mom determined that all offers must at least meet the asking price. Immediately, she had two offers—one for the asking price and one for less-than the asking price. The man who had stopped in to visit Dad one night while Dad was working on the house, had offered the asking price. Another man, from New York City, had offered less-than the asking price.
When Mr. NYC heard my parents had accepted the offer from Mr. Visitor, he increased his bid for the house.
But Mom and Dad said no go.
Mr. NYC didn’t give up. He was well-equipped with buy and sell and deal-making maneuvers.
But Mom and Dad said no go.
I think there was some discussion among the seven kids in those days—failed attempts to talk sense into Mom and Dad—like: “Are you guys crazy? Someone is offering you more money for all of your hard work!” (Mom and Dad probably said a prayer for the transformation of our greedy little souls.)
Mr. Visitor and his wife showed up at the closing for the Ironworks House without completing a home inspection. The attorneys said to them: “You haven’t had the home inspected yet.”
Mr. Visitor replied: “Have you ever watched these people build a house? There’s no need for an inspection.”
Boy do my parents love that part of the story. I do too.
So then along comes 2016, many years after the sale of the Ironworks House. Mom and Dad had moved several towns east along the Connecticut shore from where they lived when they were hard-working home makers. Mr. Visitor went on with his life and after retirement, liked keeping busy as a delivery man for a local florist. Yes, he was the one who showed up to deliver Dad’s Christmas wreath and hang it on his door.
And what became of the Ironworks House? Mr. Visitor and his wife raised their family there and created a home so happy that they passed it on to their daughter where she is now raising her family.
IF THAT ISN’T NICE, I DON’T KNOW WHAT IS!
On this, the last day of 2106, my mother is going to come home from the hospital.
Happy New Year to all from my heart and happy home to yours. I urge you, in the days to come, to notice when you are happy. When you do, take a happiness time out.
Allow the spirit to abide.
The soul concentrates, wholly, on strong impressions of pleasure or pain—so writes Dante.
Excursions 