Wednesday, July 23, 2014

Note

Elsewhere, I wrote "I am far, far happier than I was when I was younger. Probably people who had happier childhoods, youths, and young adulthoods find it harder to leave them behind: mine were full of death and dismay and a great deal of pain. So I come out on to this clear sunny sunlit water with a feeling of extreme gratitude and relief. I can't see or hear as well as I could, my mind is a bit duller for cutting a mathematical equation or learning a new language, but there's a constant upwelling of happiness in me, which either was not there, or that I was too anxious to feel, until I was well into my forties. I'm steering towards sixty now, with not a whisper of regret for temps perdu."


I thought perhaps I should say that here, since I do so much mining in the vein of "carefully caught regrets," here; I do so not because I am filled with regret, but because I, like all writers, am a shameless opportunist. I dig where I see something glitter. But my primary, overriding emotion is joy, a sense of the extraordinary abundance that surrounds me, the luck that has haunted me almost all my life. I have a knack, a talent, for happiness, that exceeds that of pretty much anyone I know: and I have been handed extraordinary materials to put that talent to work on. And so I wander out at first light and look at the sky, the perpetually astonishing sky, and it is the first morning that ever was, and I am the first person ever to look at a sky, and it is open, open all the way up to the stars, and past them. And I hear the morning birds as well as I ever did.


7 comments:

Zhoen said...

Gotta do something with all that old misery stored in the basement. Recycling into poetry seems perfectly reasonable.

Sabine said...

"I dig where I see something glitter."

which to my mind is a most beautiful motto to live by

Murr Brewster said...

My father once told me "you have a talent for happiness." It's great to see the phrase again. You could do a lot worse than channeling my dad.

Ariana said...

This is absolutely beautiful.

sarah gilbert , cafemama said...

I think I too have a talent for happiness. It is rare and treasured and worth digging for.

Anonymous said...

I've known this about you for a decade now! :)

Marly Youmans said...

It is curious that one of the good results of becoming older appears to be coming to such a point where one can hold in the mind and even perhaps bless the sometimes-terrible events that wounded and shaped us as children and made us what we are, open to the streaming world and stars and all things . . . Or so it appears to me.