On Happiness

During coffee hour at church today, your father was talking about the science of happiness.  How 50% of happiness is dependent on genetics and 10% dependent on one's circumstances but how the other 40% is simply about perspective, about how one chooses to understand one's story. 

I am sometimes not so good with gratitude.  I mean, I can say "thank you" an annoying number of times like any good Minnesotan when someone gives me a tangible object.  But I'm not so good at operating from a place of gratitude, which is a slightly different thing.  In part this is because gratitude in our culture is often communicated via treacly greeting cards and $90 bouquets.  Being self-depricating and full of dark irony seems smart and charming while the language and the behavior of gratitude often seems cloying and insincere.  In a culture that constantly reminds us of all that in wrong, broken, and inoperable, it's hard to maintain a stance of gratitude because it feels a little naive.  And it's even harder to find a language of gratitude that doesn't feel overused and cliche.  But I'm going to try.

Today I'm grateful for what looks like the last gorgeous day in maybe a long time.  Clear, sunny skies and a high of 62.  Pushing you across the bridge on Second Street yesterday I kept thinking about the five months of darkness ahead and then breathing deep.

I'm grateful for your awkward smile, your mouth twisting and contorting as it tries to figure out how to make the lips mean joy.

For your sister's honest evaluation of the world.  During the consecration of the bread and wine today she whispered loudly to Daddy, "Pastor Tim is just PRETENDING that it's blood.  It's not REALLY blood."  I'm grateful for her spindly letters in the attendance book spelling out "Peder, Kaethe, Thisbe, Matteus."

I'm grateful that I have one class this semester and I adore it.  I'm grateful for students who are smart and attentive and kind to one another.  I'm grateful that my job is to get to talk about poetry, that my homework over fall break is to plan a lecture on prosody, on the way words create movement in our bodies.

I'm grateful for your father, who keeps becoming a better and better parent and husband.  I don't mean that he was bad to begin with, he was terrific.  But he's one of the few people I know who takes failure and criticism (and sometimes his wife is a little too ample with the criticism) and listens and does even better the next time.  When Thisbe was born we both really struggled with how to keep loving one another when we were both pouring so much love into your sister.  Last night, after a long and busy day (equally busy for both of us) and while nursing his own head cold, he said, "what can I do to support you better?  How can I help?"  A few weeks after Thisbe was born he picked a few allergy-inducing wildflowers on the way home one day and offered them to me (after telling me he was going to buy a large bouquet of roses but forgot his wallet)--I burst into tears.  After you were born (and a man at the coffee shop asked when my baby was due), he brought me a gorgeous bouquet filled with all of my very favorite flowers. 

I'm grateful for two hours in a coffee shop without either of my children.  I'm grateful to get to be alone with my mind.

For my father, who drove nine hours on Thursday just to see you for 36 hours.  For Dorothy, who flew from her father's deathbed just to see you for 36 hours.  For Martha, who is leading a campaign at Luther to get the seminary to divest from fossil fuels.  For John, who is one of the best listeners I know. 

The leaves, tilting from one shade to the next.  Green to gold.  Crimson to chestnut.

For excessive cleavage. (That's the gratitude version of "my nipples are chafed and none of my shirts fit").

Though I'm not looking forward to winter, I am grateful for these turns in season, for the external shifts that remind us it's OK for our internal worlds to look like this too, for happiness to rise and dissolve and rise again.

The happiest people probably do operate from a perspective of continual gratitude.  But in another study I like to talk about a lot, one done by Dan McAdams, a narrative psychologist,  it turned out that generative adults (not the ones who were happiest necessarily, but the ones who did the most good in their communities), all shared not a position of gratitude, but a similar narrative for how they described their lives.  It was always a redemption narrative.  And though the narrative (and the article) is far more complicated that what I'm going to describe here, all of these adults saw in their lives a passage from darkness to light.  They were changed by a certain event or experience and lived their lives differently thereafter.

I don't see my life this way, though I could write a narrative that followed that pattern and all of the events inside that narrative would be true.  But I do see a continual cycle of darkness and light, passages of darkness as long as a few hours or a year followed by similar bursts of light. 

And then there are times, like the last few months, when we seem to live at the cusp between darkness and light, when every birth is coupled to a death, when happiness is no longer the point.