Thoughts from a Thinking Girl

I recently picked up a book of essays about seven pleasures that lead to “ordinary happiness.” Not bliss, just ordinary happiness. I tend to think I experience all kinds of ordinary happiness, as well as occasional bliss, so I don’t usually read how-to-get-happy books. When I perused the table of contents, I knew without a doubt that I can do these: reading, walking, looking, dancing, listening, swimming, and writing. Hell, with the exception of swimming, I already do these.

 

But what if there is even more happiness awaiting me, if I’d just do what I’m doing, but just do it all better? Do it right? Seven pleasures – even I’ve got time to brush up on 7 things (6, realistically, as there’s nothing this book is going to say that will get me to put my over-priced salon-cut and colored hair in a swim cap let alone get near the chlorine). Maybe I’ll have to swap in a different pleasure for my 7th – singing, perhaps – at home or in the shower or in the car – the pure pleasure of belting out songs I’d be mortified to sing in public but the fact of being alone gives me permission to open my mouth and sing out loud, bop to the rhythm, boogie in my seat. Maybe I’ll have to write my own essay on this pleasure. Or live with only 6/7th worth of the total human pleasure that is possible, but reserved for  those who are not so hung up about having good hair days.

 

So far, I’ve made my way through the first two essays, reading and walking. I found myself skimming ahead, impatient with the author’s meandering details of how he has found a route to ordinary happiness through seven pleasures. I had to consciously slow myself down and force myself to be open to the author’s experiences, memories, what he read, where he walked, the quotes he chose from other authors about pleasure. He is focused on the solitary nature of pleasure – reading by oneself, walking alone. These are things to do in solitude, not with friends, a book club, a mate. And he doesn’t mean power walking, or even walking for exercise; he’s describing the need to wander, stroll, set out alone and see where you end up, allowing yourself to set your own pace, duck into a café for a coffee, get lost in the thoughts that come when you’re moving. I, too, have noticed the difference in thoughts that come when I’m out and about, and those that come screeching to a dead halt when I’m smack dab in front of my computer intending to write.

 

Mainly, though, I am making my way through the book because of the promise of the essay entitled, “Looking.” I had been at my local library branch the other day, looking at books they actually shelve; I haven’t done this for a very long time, instead browsing the catalog online, and ordering in the books I want to read next. But it was a slow afternoon and I’d walked (see, I told you I do these things already) to the library to pick up something on hold for me. I had a little extra time, so I took myself over to the literary nonfiction section, and just looked. Picked up books, read a line or two, a page or three, put them back. Found a Billy Collins poetry book not too far down the shelves from the Ordinary Happiness book. I imagined that the universe is sending me some kind of sign that it’s time for me to read Billy Collins. What are the odds of coming across a book of his poetry twice – at a café a few months ago, and now a different collection, sitting right there on the shelf as if it was waiting for me to come and get it. I promptly read and enjoyed the title poem, The Trouble with Poetry, paged through it and found, to my delight, The Lanyard and re-read it slowly. I paged back to the front of the book, and was walloped with pleasure from the book’s second poem, Monday. There I was, at the library for no other purpose than to look, and I found something amazing.

 

Collins’ poem is about poets, and how they are always looking out windows. Here again is someone extolling the virtue of looking. Not just pleasure can come from looking, but poetry.

 

For the past few days, I’ve been looking out my kitchen window, waiting for the first birds to grace our newly-installed bird feeder. It reminds me of how my son kneels backward on the couch and watches out the front window when he waits for friends to come over. We are lookers.

 

Last night we saw yellow-breasted birds, a pair of them, hopping back and forth from my neighbor’s fence to our tree, hidden except for the occasional streak of yellow and the bobbing branches. They didn’t alight on the bird feeder. I called my son over and we watched, happily narrating who saw what move. The birdfeeder, every time we look, is without birds. It’s a mystery, a plot line we are all caught up in – has a bird come yet? My husband went out this morning to look; he could wait no longer. He had a theory that perhaps the recent rain had made the seeds wet, and that would have deterred our visitors. He and my son hung the feeder for me last weekend; it was what I asked for as my Mother’s Day gift: to hang the birdfeeder I’d received for my 50th birthday last year. I wanted them to have a project, for me to have it hung, for our family to have yet another jointly created something that we can look to and remember that this is what we create together. Tulips in the front of the house, and now, the birdfeeder hanging in the back.

 

I am keenly aware of the pleasure of looking. Perhaps I will read the essay and see what the author’s experiences were like, to see if there’s another way or another something I could look at. Or maybe I don’t need to hunt down ordinary happiness. It’s happening. Out my window. On a bookshelf. On a Monday, and even today, on a Friday.

 

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Monday
The birds are in their trees,
the toast is in the toaster,
and the poets are at their windows.

They are at their windows
in every section of the tangerine of earth-
the Chinese poets looking up at the moon,
the American poets gazing out
at the pink and blue ribbons of sunrise.

The clerks are at their desks,
the miners are down in their mines,
and the poets are looking out their windows
maybe with a cigarette, a cup of tea,
and maybe a flannel shirt or bathrobe is involved.

The proofreaders are playing the ping-pong
game of proofreading,
glancing back and forth from page to page,
the chefs are dicing celery and potatoes,
and the poets are at their windows
because it is their job for which
they are paid nothing every Friday afternoon.

Which window it hardly seems to matter
though many have a favorite,
for there is always something to see-
a bird grasping a thin branch,
the headlight of a taxi rounding a corner,
those two boys in wool caps angling across the street.

The fishermen bob in their boats,
the linemen climb their round poles,
the barbers wait by their mirrors and chairs,
and the poets continue to stare
at the cracked birdbath or a limb knocked down by the wind.

By now, it should go without saying
that what the oven is to the baker
and the berry-stained blouse to the dry cleaner,
so the window is to the poet.

Just think-
before the invention of the window,
the poets would have had to put on a jacket
and a winter hat to go outside
or remain indoors with only a wall to stare at.

And when I say a wall,
I do not mean a wall with striped wallpaper
and a sketch of a cow in a frame.

I mean a cold wall of fieldstones,
the wall of the medieval sonnet,
the original woman’s heart of stone,
the stone caught in the throat of her poet-lover.

 

The Trouble with Poetry: and Other Poems
Billy Collins (2005) NY: Random House

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Seven Pleasures: Essays on Ordinary Happiness

Willard Spiegelman (2009). NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.