The Safety of Stillness

What I’ve found in the stillness has astonished me.

At the beginning of the year I said to my therapist, "I'm going to tell you something I've never told anyone in my entire life." She tried not to look eager, or concerned, or even curious. She widened her eyes a little bit on accident, then narrowed them to try to compensate. I laughed because it made her look surprised and suspicious all at once, and I could tell she was going for impassive.

"I want to be happy," is what I told her.

It's not that I was unhappy. Sure, there were certain things in my life that were causing me stress and frustration and sadness and anxiety and annoyance, but that's always going to be true. In the last few years, I was struck by Long Covid to the point that I couldn't walk more than half a block, was forced to get my cervical spine rebuilt, navigated the death of my mother, mourned the death of one of my oldest and dearest friends, lost so much of what made me me at work, and watched helplessly as all my relationships got shaken like glitter in a snow globe, with no idea where any of the sparkly pieces were going to land. 

But when I said I want to be happy, I didn't mean I want to live a life without hardship or heartbreak, two of the main indicators that you haven't locked yourself away in a tower; no, I meant I want to pursue happiness, to seek it, to tail it, to track it down, to pounce on it like my cats with their kicky catnip toys, hopping on top of it and thumping my feet against it in silly bliss, to be part of the process of finding it and treasuring it and tucking it away inside my heart. 

I never chased happiness for a lot of reasons. I was such a sad, lonely, depressed little kid, going to bed every night with my eyes clenched tight praying that my life was just a bad dream. And then the whole Baptist mentality of being baked from birth like a cookie with sin chips inside it, evil sprinkled all over me and melted inside me, and there was no better way to show my appreciation to God for washing away all that innate dirtiness than being miserable for him. We had to participate in his suffering! (Philippians 3:10) We needed to rejoice in it! (Colossians 1:24) If we wanted to live a godly life, we needed to be persecuted! (2 Timothy 3:12)

I left church, came out, leapt right into activism — and, if we're being honest with each other, there's some real overlap there. Like: You don't deserve to be happy if anyone else is suffering; if you're not using every resource at your disposal, all your time and energy, and every last bit of breath and health to rip the pillars of power to shreds, you're betraying the people you claim to care for. You can't even tell Twitter you're having coffee on the porch with your spouse without a collective meltdown about how you hate single people, people with caffeine allergies, people who live in porch-less cities, people who work different hours than their spouses and can't share coffee with them, etc. I've spent my entire life thinking that seeking happiness was pretty much the most selfish thing a person like me could ever do. (Not other people, though; I have always been very convinced other people deserve happiness.) 

I guess I've also always thought that happiness is the main thing in life that can be jinxed, like how you're never, ever, ever supposed to say, "She hasn't missed a free throw in 16 games" — because that player will absolutely brick the next free throw she takes. Like if you acknowledge happiness, if you look at it too hard, if you say its name out loud, it could skitter under the barn like a feral cat and you might never see it again. 

There's a line from Ashley Herring Blake's Delilah Green Doesn't Care that's been imprinted on my brain since I read it: "That was… success. This was blood-warming, bone-settling, brain-fogging happiness." 

I think I've spent my whole life thinking happiness was that accomplished, praise-filled feeling you get from doing stuff well, being the best, winning. Yeah: success. But when my therapist asked me to say, right then, right out loud, quick quick quick without thinking, six things that make me happy, I said, "Wife, cats, bike, books, blankets, found family." 

Waking up and feeling the weight of my wife pressed against me, her warm puffs of breath ruffling my hair. The way she trails her fingers along my shoulders when she walks past my desk. The surprised bark of her most unselfconscious laugh. My cats purring on my chest or booping my nose. The joy of things going right for the people I love. The knowledge that my sister will always be right there when I need her. My friends' arms wrapping themselves around me because they're just so glad to see my face. That sound a knife makes when it slices into a pepper. A good book. Two good books in a row. Three good books in a row. The sea salt wind whipping through my hair, halfway through my bike ride, when I pedal past the last gasp of traffic and hit the park. New stickers. The tug of my wife's fingers on my ear lobe. The way I reach to put my hand in her pocket when we're watching TV on the couch, and the way she opens up her hoodie pouch, without even looking over, if there's no pocket in her jeans. The bliss of a good nap. A full day of women's basketball. Truly being seen. Truly being known. 

The last three years have been the hardest ones of my life, because Long Covid made me stop. Stop everything. No more constant movement to keep the hard stuff from settling inside me. No more over-working for the praise and self-satisfaction. No more people-pleasing to feel useful and validated. No more lying down on the tracks and letting people run their trains back and forth all over me because martyrdom is a kind of weird egoism when you get down to it. No more chasing other people's perception of successes because, well, it takes an unhinged amount of energy to hunt something you can't even really define. I had to stop. I had no choice. But what I’ve found in the stillness has astonished me. 

Happiness, for me — it turns out — is the quiet, soft, safe things. Gentleness and goodness. Tender, true warmth. 

When I told my therapist I wanted to be happy, how I wanted to be happy, she said, "Well then, it seems to me that what you need to do is open your eyes."