#2: It's becoming harder to feel happier
But feel it anyway, with your whole chest
I told myself when I started this newsletter that I would try to stuff my inherent pessimism in an old suitcase and proceed with a light heart. But on most days, it is becoming harder and harder to keep a smile on our faces knowing that, just outside our windows, people are dying and crying and wrestling with all sorts of horrors being thrown at them.
If you’d rather not read this edition, I don’t blame you. I promise to make the next edition brighter, so if you’ve had enough of the world already and want to stop reading until this time next week, I won’t hold it against you. We all have to take care of ourselves, after all.
People all over the world are experiencing rage and mistrust and a sense of visceral fear that’s a mingling of what is happening and what is to come. Here’s a sampling:
Social and political structures are papering over horrific human rights violations with witch hunts of celebrities. Raging political turmoil and the boiling over of outrage over racism defines the run-up to an election season that could – rather, needs to – turn the tables. High-schoolers turn passionate agitators calling for a shake-up of repressive education systems. As I type this, a war over land is causing the death of scores of civilians and military members.
I’d mention specific geographic locations, except all of this is happening everywhere, at varying scales and times, of different causes and to different outcomes.
While the story differs slightly across countries, there are structures and beliefs that are overarching in their repressiveness. We are united, too, but in our distress, in our tears, in our anger. We feel too much, yet too little.
There is too much noise, too many blinds being drawn, too many blinkers being put on. Tantalising carrots are dangled, and ropes pulled to avoid too much attention being given to all the right things.
It’s enough to make you bury your face in your hands, but you can’t do that. As of 2020, touching your face is cancelled.
Attention is a finicky thing; once captured by something or someone, it opens the door to your mind and creates a space in a corner here or a nook there for that something or someone. More often than not, that thing or person doesn’t deserve to live rent-free in your mind. It doesn’t deserve to tax your energy or draw on your time or stir up your emotions.
There are things that do. And that is what we must look at, stare holes through, turn inside out. And that is what we must work towards changing.
The range of emotional possibilities is stretched around the earth like a rubber band pulled taut. On one end, war brings destruction. On the other end, a mother brings new life. With every passing second, humans are experiencing a range of circumstances and emotions and situations, and that’s what makes us human.
As we struggle to make sense of the world, we still experience some of the other things that also make up a life. Sunlight on a pillow after a week of rain. The satisfying conclusion of a book or a show, a giggle of mirth that escapes your throat. The warmth of your pet’s fur on your toes tucked under their torso (tell me I’m not the only one that does this). Another sunset, more stunning than any you’ve ever seen before. They are not illicit; they are yours for the taking and for the experiencing. In this case, at least, to have one, you don’t have to give up the other.
Where am I going with this? I couldn’t tell you. The jumble of my mind has translated into this jumble of words that I’m hoping you’ll be able to pick some sense out of.
Calamity and illness have the innate capacity to take up most of our attention, leaving pits of despair in its wake. Happiness, cruelly, flits away – like a beautiful butterfly that you saw out the corner of your eye but lost when you turned to look.
But while you mourn for the world, and you voice your thoughts, and you interrogate what you’re doing and why you’re doing it, keep the little things in your pocket.
Take them out, once in a while, and allow a smile to creep onto your face without pushing it hastily away. Stare a little longer at the sunset. Put your phone away. Hold your parents’ hands. Giggle at something you found funny. Love and question and enjoy as openheartedly as a child, when adulthood was distant, uncharted territory, and all it took to feel happy was just one little thing.
Inhale, exhale.
Felted!
Felted!