In the introduction of his book The Anthropocene Reviewed, John Green said the following:
At the end of his life, the great picture book author and illustrator Maurice Sendak said on the NPR show Fresh Air, “I cry a lot because I miss people. I cry a lot because they die, and I can’t stop them. They leave me, and I love them more.” He said, “I’m finding out as I’m aging that I’m in love with the world.”
It has taken me all my life up to now to fall in love with the world, but I’ve started to feel it the last couple of years. To fall in love with the world isn’t to ignore or overlook suffering, both human and otherwise. For me, anyway, to fall in love with the world is to look up at the night sky and feel your mind swim before the beauty and the distance of the stars. It is to hold your children while they cry, to watch as the sycamore trees leaf out in June. When my breastbone starts to hurt, and my throat tightens, and tears well in my eyes, I want to look away from feeling. I want to deflect with irony, or anything else that will keep me from feeling directly. We all know how loving ends. But I want to fall in love with the world anyway, to let it crack me open. I want to feel what there is to feel while I am here.
Sendak ended that interview with the last words he ever said in public: “Live your life. Live your life. Live your life.”
Every day I battle with how to live my life. IF I’m living my life. When I’ll live my life. What at all I can do now, today, to “live a life I love and love the life I live,” as they say.
I’m desperate almost, to reveal the secrets, unlock the mysteries, plumb every channel. But it’s not easy. It’s overwhelming. Things get in my way. I feel exhausted, worn down. Discouraged. But I keep coming back to this thing I read the other day that said joy is the secret to happiness. And I think i agree.
Often I hear joy described as a bigger, better, more lasting kind of happiness but much more elusive. That mere happiness is fleeting and shallow. Maybe it’s a difference of semantics but i don’t feel this way at all. The thought that joy is mostly out of reach super sucks to me. That it’s not to be had now, today, but some time from now, far off, as a reward, perhaps. So wonderful, yet so unattainable. Boooo.
Forget that.
Joy is now. Joy is RIGHT now. Joy is this cat sitting in the space behind me between me and my chair back. Joy is cookies I’m making because I want some. Joy is the birds that found my feeder because I finally remembered to put some seed in it and spilled a ton of it on the ground so they are now in a happy little playground. Joy is in the mini celebration I throw because I got decent sleep last night. Joy is when we finally get some snow and for a few brief hours—maybe even a whole day— the world is blanketed in fluff and so, so beautiful.
And it’s not that joy comes when darkness fades. Nope. It’s not that joy and pain mutually exclude each other because good luck with that. Joy is the tiny things that keep you going in your day. It can actually penetrate sadness, not to eradicate it but exist with it. Happy + sad just sounds confusing. Joy + sad sounds enriching and real.
Joy is never a promise with stipulations and contingencies, dangled like a carrot or held for ransom until you perform better, give a technically perfect score, or as an endurance trophy. You know, only accessible if you’re really earned it. No. I refuse to buy in to that kind of joy. Life is given in joy. To EN-JOY. Even when it’s the worst.
I vacillate between feeling like life is so frustratingly short and so agonizingly long. Sometimes I look at my watch like, still? We’re still doing this? and sometimes I look wondering where the time went, desperate to get in a bunch more dives into the pool before the sun sets.
But I have found one secret that helps me no matter which one I’m feeling (very often it’s both, simultaneously) and a way to live my life, live my life, live my life. And it is:
To break down everything I can and find the pleasure it contains.
Fall in love with life and every single scrap of a thing in your day. Every tiny goodness, every wonder, every particle that when you really think about it, broken down to all its parts in beauty and function, is a tiny marvel and that each, as a standalone or a part of a greater whole, is really a thing to cherish.
There’s really a lot if you pay attention.
I came across an article that brought me a lot of joy. It’s about an intensive care nurse named Clare Dolan who opened a museum in Vermont called The Museum of Everyday Life featuring works like a pencil, a wheel, a toothbrush. Dust. I enjoy this idea of taking a random object and making it mean something more simply by putting it in a museum. Here’s what she has to say:
“It’s about paying attention. I have a slow-motion celebration of the very simple but elegant things we’re surrounded by every day. Because we’re rushing or thinking about our to-do- list, we’re often not able to appreciate or internalize the elegance, utility, and wonder of the things we’re using.
Being a nurse puts me in constant contact with how miraculous it is when everything is going OK with the body. There are so many things that can go wrong. Think about all the minute things happening in balance, keeping all your organs working, your neurons firing, your heart beating.
Through interactions with patients, I also see how ordinary objects can be special after you’ve had a rupture. For somebody who has gotten seriously ill, where even breathing or taking a sip of water is impossible, the moment when they’re finally able to wrap their hands around a cup or put their lips to a straw—oh, the miracle of the straw!—it’s a meaningful moment.”
She described her staircase in her house and how it’s been there for so much life-living, the tread worn through so much use. She says,
”This thing is holding a record of our experience. It seems so generous.”
Maybe you are saying to me,
“Jen, I don’t feel any joy right now. There is no joy to be had.”
I might reply,
”Yeah. Ok, well, can you eat a really good sandwich?
Can you wear your favorite socks that you’ve been saving? (or is that just me)
Look out the window and see some birds? Watch your neighbor pull in their trash can with the lid off, step on the lid, and fall headfirst into the can?” (also me. I fell in the can)
Joy can be had!”
(that pun is SO stupid. It was purely, honestly unintentional and I didn’t see it until the very last second and I guess I have to keep it now)
And it can especially be had because you have to find it, make it, transform something into it, because of what your broken heart, that you wake up to every single day, affords you.
Like Maurice Sendak, I find that as I’m aging, I’m falling in love with the world. My life is pared down to particles so that a whole universe is sometimes felt in a day, even captured in a moment. And sometimes when it feels really mundane and nonsensical, or even pointless, and I wonder what—no, really, what— is the point of all this, I remember that’s part of it too, the important other half of our best friends heart necklace.
I will now close out this lover letter with a poem I found recently by a fave, Billy Collins, former poet laureate, to help us fall in love with the world.
Happy Valentine’s, Valentines. ❤️
Aimless Love
By Billy Collins
This morning as I walked along the lake shore,
I feel in love with a wren
and later in the day with a mouse
the cat had dropped under the dining room table.
In the shadows of an autumn evening,
I fell for a seamstress
still at her machine in the tailor’s window,
and later for a bowl of broth,
steam rising like smoke from a naval battle.
This is the best kind of love, I thought,
without recompense, without gifts,
or unkind words, without suspicion,
or silence on the telephone.
The love of the chestnut,
the jazz cap and one hand on the wheel.
No lust, no slam of the door—
the love of the miniature orange tree,
the clean white shirt, the hot evening shower,
the highway that cuts across Florida.
No waiting, no huffiness, or rancor—
just a twinge every now and then
for the wren who had built her nest
on a low branch overhanging the water
and for the dead mouse,
still dressed in its light brown suit.
But my heart is always standing on its tripod,
ready for the next arrow.
After I carried the mouse by the tail
to a pile of leaves in the woods,
I found myself standing at the bathroom sink
gazing down affectionately at the soap,
so patient and soluble,
so at home in its pale green soap dish.
I could feel myself falling again
as I felt its turning in my wet hands
and caught the scent of lavender and stone.
Trying this thing out: Hit Join Chat to share something you love right now. Something big, something small, or something small that’s actually big.
You really fell in your garbage can? Just knowing that makes me love this world! You are the best!