Find it faster. That thing which makes you happy. It’s not as far away or as deep down as you might imagine. Let your mind go fast, flip through the images that come to it. Let your mind land and arrive. Then act.
I realized tonight that one thing that brings me happy is cartoons from the New Yorker. Also, collecting things: leaves, stamps, cards for send friends, books.
A walk outside near food trucks and a colorful swap meet. A stranger asking me if I thought lemonade or caffeine were worse for you. And wanting to hear my answer. A familiar game where you have to find people who look like the cast of your favorite TV show, even if they actually don’t look like them at all. These things bring me happy. And saying happy not happiness, also brought me happy.
A new friend on Facebook shared a poem with me today, the kind you fall into, the kind that turns your body into a brass bell and it beats inside you with sounds pouring from the deep reverberations within. Here’s the poem below from this website:
How long does a man live, after all?
Does he live a thousand days, or one only?
A week, or several centuries?
How long does a man spend dying?
What does it mean to say ‘for ever’?
Lost in these preoccupation
I set myself to clear things up.
I sought out knowledgeable priests.
I waited for them after their rituals,
I watched them when they went their ways
to visit God and the Devil.
They wearied of my questions.
They on their part knew very little;
they were no more than administrators.
Medical men received me
in between consultations,
a scalpel in each hand,
saturated in aureomycin,
busier each day.
As far as I could tell from their talk,
the problem was as follows:
it was not so much the death of a microbe —
they went down by the ton —
-but the few which survived
showeds signs of perversity.
They left me so startled
that I sought out the gravediggers.
I went to the rivers where they burn
enormous painted corpses,
tiny bony bodies,
emperors with an aura
of terrible curses,
women snuffed out at a stroke
by a wave of cholera.
There were whole beaches of dead
and ashy specialists.
When I got the chance
I asked them a slew of questions.
They offered to burn me;
it was the only thing they knew.
In my own country the undertakers
answered me, between drinks:
‘Get yourself a good woman
and give up this nonsense.’
I never saw people so happy.
Raising their glasses they sang,
toasting health and death.
They were huge fornicators.
I returned home, much older
after crossing the world.
Now I question nobody.
But I know less every day.
Pablo Neruda
Translation by Alastair Reid
A Life of Wonder 