This world is not a place for the faint of heart.
I turned fifty last year, an age that brings all kinds of sudden shifts in perspective, or did for me. A half-century on the Earth planet seems like a great gout of time, and it is, it has been. I’m stronger, much stronger, in the skills I’ve practiced. There’s less labour involved in writing fiction, for example. More pleasure in it, because I’ve done a lot of it.
Meditation, too, is an old familiar friend, and the plants I’ve learned to work with: still a developing relationship! But not the total disaster of my first few years of gardening.
It’s a pleasure, being strong enough to do some of the things I want to, being able to stand steady. There’s an emotional toughness that comes with understanding who I am.
I can see how people end up set in their ways. It’s fun, not letting the tide of change pull you under. It can become a habit. It can become calcification.
Change flies at us in ways we could never anticipate. We live through history: the world’s, our own. Behind every disaster, every alarm large and small (and there have been way too many lately), there’s a potential boast waiting on the other side: I survived. If one does survive. Not everyone does, and that can toughen us, too.
There’s another note that’s come in for me, another tune: an opening, a soft tenderness. There are formulas, many prescriptions, to achieve this, and I’ve got my favourite ones. Stretching and moving my body every day. Meditation, too. Cultivating good friendships with kind people. It doesn’t have to be complicated. Just noticing things will do: noticing without judgement. Taking things in like a baby takes them in, like a cat does: watching the world with interest, paying attention with joy.
Not allowing hard facts to take hold is part of it. Maybe that sounds facile, but it isn’t, and it isn’t easy. The world is full of hard facts. It always has been, but now it’s full of algorithms that want you to know about them all the time. A diet of bad news will sicken anyone. We’re not meant to absorb tragedy on a daily basis. I look at hard facts when I have to, but only when I have to. It’s the only way to make room for everything else.
I’m not constitutionally inclined to embrace wonder. Or rather, you could say that experience trained me from an early age to view the world as a harsh place, treacherous and dangerous and bleak. Deliberate habit has opened a soft door for me: a gently glowing portal into the bouncy castle of delight.
I firmly believe you can’t summon happiness at will. It’s something you allow. It’s something you relax into.
It comes upon me all of a sudden, as the weary summer evening sun strikes a neighbour’s flowerbed. There, in the street, my vagus nerve blooms, a sweet depth unveils itself behind my chest wall, and, for the sake of propriety, I smile instead of flagging down the nearest stranger to suggest that he also stop to admire coneflowers, black-eyed susans, and incredible, outrageous sunflowers. Did you know they come in different colours? Did you know they can be twice as tall as a person? Look how bright they are, how showy, how wonderful.
If there’s anything that’s come to mark my fiction writing in the past few years, it’s this suffusion of joy. Even though it’s hard, even though it’s sometimes an outright cataclysm, life can be very beautiful. Even in the midst of strife and conflict, there’s the potential for insight that warms you down to your bones.
I want to share that with you.
