Confessions on Happiness

When I was a teenager, my stated goal in life was to be content. Later in life, someone told me that most people’s stated goal in life was to be happy; however, most of them were remarkably discouraged with their lives.

I think of myself generally as a positive, happy person. Materially, I have a great job, a great husband, a great home in a great community, and great friends. I volunteer time with a non-profit theater company, play the piano, and am exploring the world of photography. I have two cats who like to cuddle at their discretion. So OF COURSE I’m going to be happy, right? Well…I am, but maybe not for the obvious reasons.

I once made a statement that got an unexpected reaction. I simply said, “I really have trouble remembering to not slouch, I have to think about it constantly.” My friend listening to this statement expressed surprise. I’m not sure whether she thought that I slouched constantly and was therefore failing miserably at my effort at good posture, or that she thought that my good posture was effortless. Regardless, the episode pointed out to me two things. One, our individual experiences are unique. Others don’t intuitively know our successes or trials, and we don’t know theirs. Two, we are more alike than we often admit. I don’t believe that people are successful or even happy without exerting effort. We may just not be privy to what effort is actually involved.

I firmly believe that my approach to life is the key to my happiness. The popular sentiment is often repeated that you make your own happiness, or that you choose to be happy. I believe this, too.

I take a strong lesson from Buddhism: to be mindful. To think of the path of everything and everyone around you. To remember that the disposable plastic bowl that is used at a picnic began as oil, mined from the earth, distilled in a factory, extruded into the shape of a bowl, packaged in a plastic sleeve, packed in a cardboard box, driven to a warehouse and distributed to your local grocery store, unpacked onto a shelf, picked up and purchased, driven home and then to the picnic, soiled, thrown in the trash, driven to a landfill, and finally buried in a concrete-lined hole in the ground. I appreciate the effort and the transience of my world. To remember that you don’t know what happened earlier in the day to the person who was absent-minded or rude to you while walking down the street. I don’t and can’t know other people’s perceptions of the world, and I must respect that. To remember that every decision you make will impact the people around you, and to be conscientious of unintended consequences. Respect your travel mates in your journey through life.

I also have a strong practical lesson that I learned quickly as an adult: don’t take it personally. Essentially,”it’s not all about me.” The choices that I make impact others, and the choices of others impact me. I have control over the first, and I have no control over the latter. Just because something bad happens, it doesn’t mean that harm was meant towards me, or that I did something bad to deserve it. I accept this and deal with the consequences of living, which generally means that shit will happen. If someone seems to live a blessed life, it probably just means that they encounter said shit, and took a minute to shovel it out of their path rather than wading in it. Bad things happen to everyone, but we all handle the situation in our own ways, with different outcomes.

And finally, I love the concept of karma. I don’t believe that if you do ill, that a cosmic being will smite you, or that there is a karmic bank in the sky where you deposit and withdraw good and bad credits. Instead, I believe that the community remembers when you are kind or well intentioned, and they remember when you are dismissive or downright malicious. I also believe that they will treat you in kind, and that is how community balance is achieved. Tied to this is the idea that you get what you give, not only with regard to intent, but also to effort. If you actively participate, you have a say in where you are and what you are doing; if you passively let things happen to you, you place yourself to be influenced by the whims of the world and its billions of inhabitants. Take responsibility rather than shifting it elsewhere.

Last night I was reminded to shout my intentions out to the universe. And so here is a piece of them. As I enter my 30’s, I remind myself that I want to continue to make myself a better person, in part by making life easier for everyone I contact in whatever way I can. I can share how I make myself content, in hopes that someone else might find an idea that applies to their life, and makes them a little happier. I can smile at a stranger and wish them good morning, hold a door for someone with their hands full, or pick up something that they dropped. I can refrain from being annoyed at a perceived wrong, thereby preventing an unpleasant situation from escalating simply because my pride was bruised. I can do my best to keep life in perspective: of what’s really important, and the impact of my action or inaction.

NOLA

I love cities that are of themselves: they have accepted who they are, they embrace themselves, and they make no apologies.

Enter New Orleans.

Our hotel was in the Warehouse District. Walk out the front door of the Hilton Garden Inn, and to your right is an interstate flyover. And some warehouses. To your left is a dive bar, with yummy po-boys and beans and rice, where you will share a lunch table with strangers.

Walk towards the river and you’ll find the convention center and the elongated but air-conditioned Riverwalk Mall. Walk away from the river and you’ll find buildings that, according to the flaking advertisements painted on their great masonry walls, housed durable goods in a past life. The behemoths have recently been resurrected and divided into homes for hipsters. Continue walking and you can look through the windows of art studios and galleries, and the posh World War II museum.

Walk from the hotel to the French Quarter. You’ll smile at your reflection in the glass storefronts of banks, offices, and restaurants that are only open for lunch Monday through Friday as you pass through the Central Business District. Museums, Harrah’s Casino, and signs pointing to the Aquarium greet you on Canal Street as you navigate the streetcar tracks. Fortune-tellers, street artists, musicians, and performers fill the streets around Jackson Square. Boutiques, galleries, restaurants, and coffee shops fill the first story windows of the streets of the French Quarter. Shuttered windows behind porches full of greenery mark the second-story residences. You will pass churches and a convent. The doors and windows of Bourbon Street open up at night, illuminated by the neon signs and the promise of entertainment. Later, music will spill out, either from karaoke or a cover band. (They say to go to Frenchmen Street for jazz.) Grocery stores sell food for the residents, and the permanent half of the French Market displays local produce and food stalls. Local “arts and crafts” fill the tables of the flea market in the back half.

You won’t really remember the smell of the city, because your nose goes a little numb. Fish, piss, river, beignets and coffee all schmooze together with the humidity.

Hop the Canal Street streetcar line. Ride it out of the city center, towards the SuperDome. Remember Hurricane Katrina, and realize that until now there has been no other reminder of her…

Note that only tourists use the public transportation. Also note that the timetables are whimsical suggestions, assuming that you can actually locate one. Tourists mustn’t have deadlines or people to meet. Those tourists must have somewhere else to be.

Continue to City Park. En route, see the boarded up storefronts, the well-maintained employment office, and the faces staring up at the tourists riding the streetcar. You may witness some New Orleans natives actually enter the car and sit near you, distant from the French Quarter. If you’re lucky, someone might hand you a poem to read while you pass the time screeching along the track. Once you reach the end of the line and enter the park, appreciate the groomed botanic gardens, the resident rooster, the misplaced Japanese Garden (at least the weather is authentic), and the soggy cacti. Enjoy the sculpture garden, and consider visiting the art museum.

Ride another streetcar down Saint Charles Street. The trees and cast iron balconies are draped in strings of plastic Mardi Gras beads. Tangles of them. Webs of them.

The Garden District does actually have a coffee shop and a restaurant. You can walk past both of them if you like, so that you can stop and stare at historic homes. Huge houses with iron lace curtains adorning the porches and doorways, with great cast iron fences, with stained glass windows, with gilt details, with mature trees and flowering bushes, with letter boxes and lion’s head door knockers. The corresponding grocery stores and luncheries are on Magazine Street. If you head that direction, you will pass through the neighboring neighborhoods, where people drive Fords and keep Mother Mary statues in their front yards. The houses are no less colorful and much less shuttered. You might be lucky enough to say hello to a man as he “walks” his half-paralyzed dog, or an elderly woman as she carefully tends her front gate. You may see a Victorian home peeled back as it ages, displaying the layers of roofing and siding and broken windows that frame the heavy old door. As you pass a decrepit old masonry building with fascinating detailing, you will realize that it is not abandoned when you turn the corner and spot the new Free School sign behind a freshly painted fence.

Cemetery walls enclose forgotten tombs where a pile of bricks that was once a wall and marker hugs the exposed steel vault, a mere foot away from an immaculate granite mausoleum fronted by a weeping angel that evokes a requiem and breaks your heart. Stillborn children and toddlers share gravesites with their great-great grandparents. The magnolia trees shade a piece of broken wall, where the mason’s initials have been exposed in the formerly hidden mortar.

New Orleans wears its dichotomies on its sleeve: the rich and poor living and socializing just a hair’s breadth apart, the clean and the dirty separated by a street corner, the tourist brushing the shoulder of a local, the impermanence and perseverance. Sailors, traders, soldiers, clergy, criminals. The spirits are still there to see and to hear. You can almost perceive the ghosts, as you tread the same paths and feel the same desires. Work hard, play hard, witness and partake in the spectacle. Live.

And then place your luggage in the back of a cab. The cabbie will check his log, and ask you to guess how long he has been waiting at the cab stand in front of the hotel…almost three hours. He is quite happy to take you to the airport, where you can enjoy a warm beer and wait for United to take you home.