Pursuit of Happiness

The Pursuit of Happiness

Girlfriend took Valentine’s Day off work, and we spent the entire day in bed together. If not for the stomach flu, it might have been just dreamy…. As it was, we thrashed and moaned and sweated in quite unromantic ways, and did an admirable job sharing a single bathroom under exigent circumstances.

After the worst of it had passed, after we had concluded that we would both survive this—and that we wanted to—after we had slept the sleep of the depleted, we spent a long weekend recovering together. We toasted our survival with Gatorade, congratulated one another on not fainting in the shower, reassured each other that another nap did not count as indulgence.

And we talked.

At first, we mostly talked about intestines. And then food—from the bland to the borderline to the first inkling of a craving for, hell, chocolate. Over time, our topics widened past digestion, and Monday night we started thinking on this question: what keeps us from pursuing happiness?

We don’t have children to attend to, Girlfriend—a nurse—is imminently employable and I can make my way. We have this fantasy we talk about sometimes: a little house, close to the beach, in the small town of Kailua, on Oahu, in Hawai’i. “What keeps us here?” we wondered. “What are we waiting for?”

The beach house acted as a useful stand-in for, well, happiness. Not that we’re miserable right now—but we’ve been mostly moving out of obligation in our day-to-days. There are bills to pay, you know, and clients to attend to. Even the decision that I’d take a sabbatical was framed in terms of need, avoiding some catastrophe. “If I don’t get a break…” “If I am ever going to write…” etc.

But why not do it in Kailua? Or even in New England, where our relationship has legal presence, where the flu won’t lead us both to contemplate the strain potential disability could place on us, how we might make it in the absence of shared health insurance, how we might bicker and complain and likely come apart within a system that just might refuse to allow us to take care of one another? And again, the thinking’s framed in terms of ducking from catastrophe…what keeps us from pursuing happiness?

We talked about our first big move—our first strong shared emotion: let’s get the hell away from Texas. (Now that we don’t live there, some affection for the state has surfaced. But when we both felt stuck there with the longhorns…well, it seemed big and dry and pretty miserable. I ditched my cowboy boots as soon as I had a new forwarding address—a move that seems a little rash these days. Even Jesus says, just knock the dust off, keep the shoes.)

“How did we know?” we wondered, about our first and great escape. “Look how well it all worked out.” I said. “Does superstition keep us here, some sense we should stay out of some gratitude—or a feeling that we’ve used our luck, the next place can’t be this much better?”

“We were ready, then,” said Girlfriend, in her wise and irritating way. “We aren’t ready now.”

“Not ready to be happier?” I cried. “How weird is that?”

She shrugged a Buddha shrug at me, and we got pretty quiet.

Not ready to be happier. It’s been six weeks I’ve been away from work. I’ve spent a good deal of my time imagining how I will work again. Although we made a financial plan for me to stay at home, I think about revising it—using the money that we put aside to purchase my own time to pay off bills instead. I keep myself out of the basement workshop, where I know I find this special quiet underneath the power tools, where I recall a certain sensuality in fitting wood together—there’s a room to build, an office window seat. I can almost taste how it will feel to sit and read and write there.

Not ready to be happier. We let the matter rest.

And then, like some small forest creature, and idea scampered in. Maybe, we considered, Girlfriend could shift her schedule slightly. She has taken up these morning walks—these strolling visits through the neighborhood. She comes back from them lit up some quiet way, with news about the weather and the timbre of the day. This is about the only time, all day, she is alone at her own pace. She loves these walks, and it is clear they do her good. But, not rarely, she ends up late for work.

And so, on Monday night, this small idea nosed its way across the scraps of our Hawai’i conversation. Why not shift that schedule—work 9-5 or 10-6, instead of 8-4? There would be ample time for morning walks. We could have breakfast with each other. Girlfriend would be…happier. Not rushed, not so conflicted, ready for her job when she arrived.

There are, of course, conditions and exceptions, and permissions to acquire. But the idea, of itself, is brilliant, simple, and likely to profoundly change the way we live our life together. The logistics might get shifted, but the tiny beating heart of it—that Girlfriend can afford herself the best part of her day—that commitment’s here to stay.

As I watched this notion make itself at home, I thought about the way it had arrived. It showed up only after we had stopped, after Hawai’i had been placed back upon the shelf, after the scheming and the poking and the comparisons had stilled. I thought about that phrase, “pursuit of happiness,” and thought that maybe it is, commonly, misunderstood. Perhaps the pursuit belongs to happiness, and not to us. Maybe happiness is chasing us, and not the other way around. Perhaps, instead of aiming farther, going further, faster toward it, we need instead to slow way down—and let ourselves be caught.