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Category Archives: Happiness
Simplicity Itself
Simplicity, I think, is like most of the virtues and values that we humans might hold dear–those who have it don’t necessarily appreciate it, and those who talk the most about it tend to know the least about it.
The rich and comfortable are so obsessed with the idea or ideal of simplicity nowadays that there are magazines, fashions, classes and whole philosophical movements devoted to its study and cultivation. People will expend massive quantities of energy and spend large quantities of money on trying to simplify their lives and themselves, when very likely simply giving up the energetic striving and letting go of the amassed money would do the trick in a trice. (Perish the thought!)
The poor and underprivileged have ultimate simplicity forced upon them, and tend to choose whether to embrace the unsullied earthiness and quietly hardworking ways thrust on them by their circumstances or to battle against them. Probably a majority of people, both poor and rich, will always think the grass greener where they are not, and hardly give thought to how hard the next person is trying to get over the fence onto their own enviably other property. Dissatisfaction may be an essential part of humanity’s natural state of being, much as it naturally chafes us to think so.
On the other hand, looking at what dissatisfies us with as unsparingly honest a glare as we can might in fact shed some light on how to find better contentment, not necessarily by having more or less of something (tangible or ephemeral) but by giving it all its appropriate due and then saving our true love for the most meaningful virtues and values of all. At the very least, that narrows down the field for most of us. At its best, it frees us up to say that life is remarkably livable where we exist right here, right now, regardless of the shade or tint of the lawn. The simple presence of any one particular leaf of grass or bud of bloom in the one square foot of soil nearest to hand may be quite enough, at least for one simple day.
Another Good Thing about Waving One’s Arms
Waving my arms is something I may think about more than the average person does. From when I was pretty young I was conscious of arm movement as being mighty significant in a seriously diverse series of ways. First of all, there was that childhood training we all enjoy, if we’re well inducted, in the art of waving hello and farewell. I have almost always preferred the former to the latter, but in either case, whenever the occasion was deemed genuinely worthy of such a gesture, I knew that it was a sign of love or affection, and that made it pretty darn worthwhile.
Then again, I also had an early fondness for wagging my crayon-gripping fist over a piece of paper (or whatever flattish surface was convenient) to make squiggly lines and, if I got lucky, get them to coalesce into picture-like concoctions. I might be sitting off in a cozy corner at Grandma and Grandpa W’s, scribbling away, with the faint sounds in the background of parental and grand-parental chatter as they sat drinking their coffee intermingled with the slight chattering sound of Grandpa’s cup doing a little jitterbug against the saucer, because he had a mild tremor in his hand. Of course, his arm-waving was hardly dramatic, but it was one of those delicate underpinnings of my early memory that became part of the whole subtle weave of my perceptions.
Sometime in my early teens or thereabout, I found that the family resemblance extended to my having my own familial tremors, occasionally in my head and neck but mostly in my hands and arms. There have been times when it was more pronounced than was entirely convenient for a person wanting to draw, but fortunately it’s rarely been at problematic extremes, more often merely requiring that I find ways to compensate for or control or use the tremors to advantage in my art-making. In any event, keeping my hand in (no pun intended) as an artist has tended to keep the inevitable interactions of these two kinds of arm-waving present in my attentions. Meanwhile, my other grandmother had her own kind of arm-waving to lend to the family skill-set: Parkinson’s Disease.
Typically, Granny had the wit and will to battle her Parkinsonism not only with great tenacity in staving off the ravages of the illness for many more years than is typical but also with a lot of good-natured humor, because that was her style. So whenever we had a family gathering, she was the first to offer her services for tossing salads and making milkshakes. That my mother has followed in the Parkinsonian lineage would make her forms of arm-waving far worse to behold, knowing that the same sort of insidious progression lay ahead for her, and to be fair, including the knowledge that the odds are a bit higher for me than for some that I will eventually join the parade, but she too has maintained a bright attitude about it all. Besides that, I am very slightly suspicious that her particular skillfulness when it comes to shaking the dice gives her a unique edge in the evening board games.
But the top of the list when it comes to magnificent ways and reasons to wave one’s arms has surely got to be the one I’ve been witnessing so much now that the concert season is well underway again: conducting. Bands, orchestras, operatic performances, choirs. No matter what the form of the musical art, if there is a conductor up there waving his, her (or, particularly, my beloved husband’s) arms, the love that fills the air is what makes all of the arm-waving a worthy and beautiful thing. It brings hearts and minds into focus and, often, into community, and it makes the world a more wonderful place to be.
And that makes me want to stop waving my arms altogether, just opening them wide enough to embrace that better world and anyone I can in it.
Apparently I Executed the Secret Handshake Wrong or Something
Cinderella Opts Out
From your assessment of my deportment,
I must ask what the statement “of a sort” meant–
Oh, was I, I wonder, a shade improper,
Not brass perhaps, but a hint of copper?
Did I stand out from the regal crowd
By being a decibel too loud?
When I met the Queen, did I rudely greet her
With a curtsey too small by a millimeter?
Did I jostle the King, or step on his toes,
Or remark on the magnitude of his nose?
Have I shocked the royal entourage
With an unplanned glimpse of décolletage?
Say, what have I done in these latter days
To occasion such backward, lukewarm praise?
Do tell me where this prejudice starts
That substitutes etiquette for hearts!
I’ll not be one of the prince’s bijoux
Knowing I can’t have the wit to please you–
I’m off for home, where they make no sport
If my manners are only “of a sort”.
Treasure Knows Neither Time nor Place
A memory-driven image by my great-uncle Rolph Bolstad . . .
I have been scanning and digitally restoring a number of photos out of our family’s trove, a heap that resembles the disorganized and neglected stores of many other families. I make a small dent in the stack from time to time, then get distracted by everyday life and often don’t revisit the project for quite a while again. While many of us obsess over parting with beloved memorabilia of any kind, the truth is that the majority of us don’t do much with it when we have it.
All good things are that way, I suppose: love, joy, peace and happiness of both the material and the intangible sorts are seldom given their full respect when we have them, only mourned when we think they’re out of reach. And from what I’ve seen and heard from friends around the globe, this is a foolishness that transcends all sorts of differences and makes us more alike than not–no matter what our location or culture, our beliefs, hopes, and dreams, we all seem to wrestle with this forgetfulness about appreciating what we truly value that we have right in hand, and the minute that we suspect we’re about to lose our grip on those gifts, whether by our own decisions or perforce, we get panicked and become certain that it’s a sign of apocalypse. Surely the end of our own self and sanity, and very possibly, that of the universe as we know it.
I come across that box of yet-to-be-scanned photos from time to time and get a pang: what if I don’t get back to this project before I forget who’s in the photos, where the shots were taken, before the images are too faded or decayed to be rescued at all?
Well, what if?
Honestly, I know full well that it will not be the end of the world. Not even the end of my pleasurable revisiting of those memories–what’s more significant than retaining this flimsy physical repository of memories is whether I use the versions of them in my head and heart while they last (head, heart and memories, all three). Once gone from there, the data held in a picture is only cold, meaningless data after all, and it never contained the warmth and soul of anyone or anything depicted in it. It’s merely a shadow-play version of the husk that is my human form and will no longer be me when I die.
So I’ll keep leafing through these paper and binary mementos of mine as long as it pleases me to do so, remembering mostly that what is seen therein is always more beautifully carried inside me. Change is indeed the only constant, yet in the photograph my great-uncle took, probably in Johannesburg, around sixty years ago there is the ephemeral prototype of the photograph I took in New York less than a decade ago. Fifty years or fifty centuries, it matters little if we learn to respect and rejoice in what remains true and crosses the boundaries of place and time as long as we keep it alive inwardly.
New York City lives in my own memory as much as in a physical place . . . its beauties, like all things loved and valued, lies in me, in others’ hearts, far more than in itself or any image we can conjure of it . . .
Call Me Thomas–No, *Really*
In some areas of experience, I am admittedly as credulous as a baby, but generally I suppose I tend toward the skeptical. If American political, religious and social rhetoric can’t turn anybody into a skeptic I don’t know what can, but I find there’s plenty of fodder for the mill in endless other realms. ‘The Most Delicious Boeuf Bourgignon You’ll Ever Eat!’ Truly? Then why does your [self-] acclaimed dish look so convincingly pre-digested and taste exactly like I would imagine cheap dog food to taste? (Just so you know, the idea that I’ll never want to eat Boeuf Bourgignon again after yours doesn’t count as its being the best I’ll ever eat.) No such thing as Climate Change? Feel free to run around in your skivvies while half of us are bundling up for the lowest temperatures in forty years and then mummify yourself in a zeppelin-sized parka while the rest of us try to keep a modicum of cool somehow–all I can say is, I learned how to read a thermometer when I was smallish, and the patterns on that alone have changed plenty in my brief time stomping around the planet to convince me that the weather’s different from what it once was.
‘Organic’ food? Great! But know thy USDA regulations–and what many needful things they may well lack. ‘Green’ energy from windmills? Well, yeah, I am fully persuaded that the simple movement of our breathable atmosphere is far more reliable and consistent and predictably present for generations than, say, vintage Pleistocene joy-juice (a.k.a. stinky petroleum-based fuels)–as long as we also keep in mind that there are offsets: the parts for contemporary wind farms are produced and serviced in very few locales yet and are often therefore shipped across the continent by truck–teams of semi tractor-trailer drivers plus guide cars are required for shipping a single giant blade of one of those behemoths several days cross-country–both to their workplaces and to be repaired. Yet I wouldn’t say wind power isn’t one of our better currently available alternatives. I just think the inquiry must be made, and honesty and transparency are useful all along the way.
Question authority? How about questioning everything and assuming nothing!
All the same, none of us is equipped to investigate every single experience, idea or item that comes our way so thoroughly as to fool ourselves we’re magically well-informed. We must assume, trust, take chances and hope or we will surely stultify and die. Not to mention that it’s very easy, especially for those who, like me, have any tendencies toward insularity, NIMBY attitudes, fear of change, anxiety disorders, allergies or eccentricities that don’t fit nicely with the communal norms to simply hole up and hide from unpleasant and unpredictable reality. And when you boil everything down, I find I’m not actually the least bit attracted to being a conspiracy theorist, aggressive activist for or against anything, or to adopting the kind of narrow, mean-spirited and curmudgeonly attitude that I find repellent in other people.
So I may pry a little bit at the lid of the shipping crate to see what’s really inside it or nag you a little to justify your claims that you’ve invented the world’s most astonishing miracle product, but beyond that, I’m content to believe that the universe is generally fairly benign and most of the people in it rather pleasant and honest, after all. Clearly, you needn’t take offense at my insistence on your being straightforward with me and my preferring to be forthright with you, although I still believe in the value of a certain few little white lies, so you’ll never know absolutely whether I do or do not think those summer pants of yours make your backside look like the White Cliffs of Dover.
Meanwhile, you may call me a bit of a Doubting Thomas, or better yet, just call me Thomas, which was in fact the name my parents had reserved for me in case I turned out to be a boy-child. Because, let’s face it, their previous one-child history of producing girls didn’t prove anything, and their doctor certainly wasn’t able to guarantee my girly-tude in those ancient days, so it was more practical to assume that the little Kathryn Ingrid sprout could possibly show up and be a Thomas Lauren instead, or even have the personality of a Katrina (another option they kept open) rather than a Kathryn, whatever that meant. It’s just best to know that we can’t always guess how things are going to turn out and we don’t always know everything, at least unless we do the homework and get lucky. And if it all catches us by surprise, that might not be an entirely terrible thing, either.
Will You Sing in My Stead?
When I can Sing No More
When I am weary, worn beyond all reckoning,
My breath is gone and voice has ceased to sound,
The darkness draws me in, its silence beckoning
And luring me to lie down on the ground–
To fall asleep; perhaps to melt there into death,
Because I can no longer coax my throat
To speak of joy, or yet to longer draw a breath,
To sing a song as long as one fine note–
Beloved Friend, how sweet if you will stand for me
And draw the air that lifts the lark to wing
Its way across the sky–if you will kindly be
My voice, and raise your own aloft and sing–
For in my silent darkness I shall never die
Long as your voice goes on and in your song I lie.
Rust in Peace
I flatter myself that I am improving with age. This morning’s Wordsmith offering from the fabulous Anu Garg of A.Word.A.Day was ‘crepitate’–one of my very favorites, thanks to the also fabulous S.J. Perelman‘s introducing it to me in the context of one of his typically scintillating, outrageously funny tales. I was reminded that crepitation refers to the creaking cracking popping grinding and other percussive noises of dusty old age, and that, not at all surprisingly, Perelman used it in self-deprecatingly hilarious description of his own antiquated joints as he gave what one must assume was–despite his stated intent of dash and panache–a dance demonstration to his date that was more rusty than rakish. Having done the requisite amount of damage to my own human machinery over the years by falling over and off of things, lifting things I had no business hefting, and in turn, turning, squeezing, smacking and otherwise torquing various portions of myself just enough more out of sync and syncopation that it’s remarkable if I only creak and don’t fall into syncope or crack up altogether.
So, whether dancing or just shuffling my slippered way around the hallowed halls of home, I consider myself very fortunate only to ‘boop, whoosh, queel and grake‘ like another of my pantheon of fabulous wordsmiths, James Thurber‘s, old family car, and not to simply disintegrate wholly on the spot. Grey hairs? Bring ’em on! (Best color of hair I’ve ever owned by nature, as it happens.) Wrinkles? Oh, my, yes. Smile creases are only a badge of honor reserved for people who’ve had long and happy enough lives to earn them. Aches and pains will generally come and go, with more of the comings than the goings as time passes and I forget to accommodate my crepitude a little, but by golly it beats lying around and dissipating into a dust bunny of boredom.
And honestly, lots of things get more beautiful not just in spite of but because of their evident age, so why shouldn’t I give it a try?
Matters of Perspective
Stormy skies can bring destruction . . . or the rains of growth and promise . . .
I’ve said before, and in ever so many ways, I’m a firm believer that we all live our lives wearing our own very distinctive glasses. By that I’m not referring to the glass-half-full vs. glass-half-empty attitude–but that’s indeed part of the whole idea. It’s about how we see the world through our individual filters.
In a fairly concrete fashion, that means that the quality of my actual eyesight–my acuity, ability to detect and distinguish colors, textures, shapes, depth of field aided by stereo vision, and all of that sort of thing does, in fact, have a profound effect on my world view and how I experience my passage through it in life. As a longtime visual artist, I am dependent upon all of this stuff for my very sense of self.
But I’m also convinced that each of us has a life history that includes our adventures from birth to the present, our nurturing or lack thereof, our environment and resources and social contacts and political influences and educational progression, and that whole reality is so distinctive for each of us, right down to a cellular level, that I can’t quite imagine how even the closest of kin could possibly have identical points of view.
I’ve been reminded of this in the last few days as I’ve been reading the latest Oliver Sacks book on which I’ve laid hands: The Mind’s Eye. Every book of his that I’ve read thus far is, since he’s a neurologist, a humane and humorous thinker, a deeply curious scientist, and a citizen of the world with wide-ranging interests, bound to be an adventure. Given the visual theme of this particular collection of case-studies (including his own discovery of and treatment for an ocular tumor), it is indeed a confirmation of my sense that such complex inventions as human bodies, multiplied by the almost infinite variants those influences I mentioned above can infuse, create and incubate an incredible range of possible ways to see and experience life in this world and whatever we can conceive of beyond it.
Yes, I am enjoying this latest Sacks book as immensely as I have all of his thus far. It’s been rather striking, too, to add to the layers of my own filters, many of which I’ve only come to recognize rather more recently in my life. I have sussed out and confirmed to my own wildly non-medical satisfaction that I am very probably distinctly dyslexic or cognitively ‘different’ in a whole bunch of ways, and having looked at this good doctor’s descriptions of face-blindness, or prosopagnosia, I’ve a feeling that my realization sometime not long past that I might have a degree of face-blindness might well be accurate. I’m certainly no less inclined to believe it since immediately before the book arrived on scene at the local library, I was working in our front yard when a car pulled up and the nice driver called me by name and conversed with me pleasantly until I could identify by her voice, questions and comments that she is the neighbor who lives directly across the street from me. Sigh. Sometimes the ol’ filters do get a little blurry.
More importantly, though, I’m convinced that how we respond to our life experiences and our histories–the choices we make and what we do with what we’re given and who we are within it–those are the truly telling filters. They’re the things by which we’ll be known, be remembered (if we’re remembered), and that offer us ways to define ourselves and our place in the world. So while I’m happy as an artist to play (as you saw in the last couple of posts) with my reality in the artificial world of visual imagery and how I attempt to show others what it’s like to see through my lens, I realize that my moods and attitudes are a part of that process too. Can I get others to understand or accept my point of view? Rarely, if I’m mighty fortunate. Can I help them to see it? More likely, if I work hard. Can I give them happy access to their own filters that might improve their moment or their day? That, I hope, I can do if I am true to the better of my instincts in responding to the world as I know it and expressing, the best that I’m able, with passion and with compassion. With love and joy.
Heavens! What started as a grim and ominous day can become something bright and hopeful . . .
It’s that Time Again
It’s a time of year when a whole lot of concerts and recitals are reawakened in the College of Music hereabouts, so tonight we headed out for the usual eight-in-the-evening music making. The sunset led us west to the concert hall–but just barely, as the evenings are shortening already by now–and the house was well crowded with people eagerly pressing in to hear their first of the orchestra’s season of performances. Arturo Márquez – Danzón No. 2, Ludwig van Beethoven – Piano Concerto No. 4 in G Major, Op. 58, Béla Bartók – Concerto for Orchestra—the latter, a scintillating performance of the virtuosic, wonderfully evocative and cinematic piece to set the bar very high for the year.
It’s also time to get another day’s post up on the blog, if I’m to meet my ‘local midnight’ deadline. Time to gather up my thoughts for the day into whatever package has offered itself, arrange my neurons into a more restful, sleep-invoking mode than last night’s (not another wake-every-half-hour one, please! What was that all about?) and recharge my batteries for tomorrow. Time also to look ahead in the autumn and think of when we can invite friends for visits, what is next on my long list of projects and chores and art making events that fits with my current resources and mood.
In short, it’s That Time: life as usual. The good, the busy and the unpredictable continue to flood my days and nights with change and, as it’s said, the more things change the more they stay the same. I don’t know for certain what tomorrow will bring beyond the few enigmatic things noted on a fairly bland and unadorned seeming calendar, yet every hour that ticks by in my existence brings with it some new piece of knowledge, a surprise visitor, events not planned or expected, a whole array of shifting atoms that make each moment quite different and generally much larger than I feared or hoped it would be. And that is how, in a sort of cosmic conundrum, I manage to find mystery and adventure and the impossible all utterly normal and quite the logical thing to happen to me, time and again.
Art-Colored Glasses 