I’ve never struggled with a question more. Am I happy now, as opposed to before? And if before I was happy by some measure, why would it have changed? How can I think of happiness now, when everything is terrible? Even if I know that this moment doesn’t differ from any other moment in history. That is to say that these new days are full of old sorrows, and long after I am dead and gone, the same will be true. But just because all this has happened to generations before and will beyond us, it doesn’t feel any less painful in its proximity.
It’s a simple question, something you’d ask on a first date perhaps. Yet I don’t think I’ve asked that question of myself before. I’d asked what I need to do in the moment, to feel better, to give back, to be productive, but never what would make me happy in the grand arc. I argue that I must have been looking for it all this time, yet when I approach the question head on, when I vow to improve at life, health, work and in turn happiness – it always feels like a brand-new prospect – a thing I hadn’t considered before.
When I’ve tried to grasp the concept of my happiness, it falls from the hand like sand, but the sun-hardened, unsealed sugar type of sand, an almost-form rendered formless. It’s like I can see the thing, consistent happiness, but I lose the will to hold it gently enough. I get in its way. I think I’m constantly overthinking the basest of emotions and perhaps the question will always be complicated unless its answer is the most salient, most unembellished, gut response.
On my morning dog walk the other day I was happy. It’s roughly an hour, past the end of the street into the fields and pockets of forests and back. There’s our favourite place – something about the way the paddock undulates that makes pools to splash at a certain time of year. Then the meadow is a thriving ecosystem of spiders stitching, and robins bathing – those magical birds that can see magnetic fields. Rumi the shepherd was running in the long grasses and crashing face first, a mouthful of a stick, into the paddock’s soft landing.
Me, I was looking into the undergrowth and found two cèpes that I carried home in the palm of my hand. I collected warm eggs from the straw bed of Veronica and the Heathers, kale stems from the remaining garden, and made a breakfast for two. I remember feeling genuinely happy that the food was gifted from its natural state.
Connecting with the seasons makes me happy. When I can know and name the plants, when I can forage for food – buckets of blackberries in summer, crouching in the spring fields of sorrel, filling endless bags, the mounds of chestnuts collecting in the fall, and the slow watchful hunt for mushrooms in winter. When I swim and allow the days to slow down in summer and not push against the heat, when I’m in a part of the forest so deep and still that animals appear, when I’m out there as the sun is setting, and feel its warmth on my face. When I sleep early in winter. When I live seasonally, I can find joy in not having everything at once. Just as I can’t have strawberries in the off-season, I can’t will something that isn’t ready – like a work in progress.
When I’m connecting like this to nature’s pace, I can better reckon with the fact that things come and go and take time. When I’m in tune with the season I feel relieved by the truth that our lives can be abruptly, painfully short – and it connects me to my family, to those whose lives were cut short, to the process that gave my grandparents joy – fishing and growing food, to what gave my ancestors purpose. It connects me all the way back.
There are other things that make me happy – if I close my eyes and imagine the scene of happiness, so much seems as if it is the undocumented type – dancing with the few people I love more than breath and wishing that the song never ends, laughing over the phone across oceans, those enormous Sunday sleep-ins on fresh sheets, waking to bird and road traffic instead of alarms, wading out into the ocean with my husband, our backs bent and our hands padding the surface of the water, coaxing our weary dog to swim, going to the gym with my teenager at 5am – only the stars as witness and apostle. There in my mind’s eye are those joys, the moment just before the thought to take a photograph, not a photograph itself.
But there lives pain too, the big cuddles and tears together when my arms are needed, and I am clinging on to the world, in those moments there is something so, not happy, but significant, about being emotionally available for my 17-year-old in a way I never imagined I could be. I think, as a parent, wellbeing is fused between us – that I’ve got to be well to give well. That I’m responsible for this young person’s life and livelihood gives me so much joy and gratitude and happiness, but also, because it is filled with fear and dread and stress that it could be taken away, makes it so tragic. I think happiness looks so close to sadness because death’s threat hangs over all of us. Because it’s just once, our life and the lives of the people we can’t live without. I think what makes my life happy is what makes my life meaningful – it’s what I’ll miss most if I were to leave tomorrow.
Not yet a year after my brother’s death and still trying to battle the grief, I’d walked about Darwin with the late artist and elder Uncle Jack. I’d told him about this pain, about how I thought I was sick, or an alcoholic, that I’d never make it out of sadness. He told me that I’d already obtained all the help I’d ever need for my ailments. He said, “You’re a writer, all you have to do is your art and you’ll be well”.
Back then I thought writing was the source of my illness, but as time goes, I think Uncle Jack was right, that it’s part of my cure. Not because it is easy, but because it is so painfully difficult. I think its significance is the way through to happiness. Through the writing I am drawn back to myself, I can work the existential problems on the page, reckon the past.
I feel as if every day is a wrestle attempting to conquer myself, week after week, and month and year and decade after decade. It’s as if I’ve been trying to arrive at a moment in time where I’ll be peaceful, where I’ll have answered the emails, become a good friend, have met all my deadlines, when my family is perfectly healthy and content and where I’ve commanded a balance over my life. But its destination is only a mirage on the horizon that I’ve been trying to reach either by bordering on burnout, or curled under a mound of blankets, willing the world away. That’s where I think I’ve always swung – between action and arrest.
In writing this all down, I’ve been thinking I know more about what grief is, what fear and isolation are, what self-sabotage and depression are than I do happiness. But those things won’t go away even if I can hold on to this formula for happiness. I’ve realised, only now, that I have to write those intrusions silent. I have to walk them tired. I have to swim them drowned. And that every day I’ll have to slay them again. So that life gets in.
That’s the best part – the life bit, the surprising, silly stuff. The accidental part, the playful bit. Play, like foraging, is stored as some of the most joyous moments of my life. But they remain there in a sort of pain, a sort of sorrowful happiness – because they, both nature and my loved ones, are attached to the fleeting preciousness of these moments, and our lives together.
What makes me happy now is what I think will always make me feel – this emotion and its depth. That I can feel something so eviscerating is what happiness is. That I can remember my brother’s laugh, my grandparents voices over the telephone. That I can soothe my child in anguish. That I can reach the end of the water’s depths or forest and make it back. That I can feel those things that are painful is happiness.
Maybe it’s something I learned, like most things, only when I arrived there, here, now.
Tara June Winch is the author of The Yield, After the Carnage and Swallow the Air
