This Is Happiness

The morning light is shining on an orange candle on my kitchen table. Not something earthshaking to write about, but somehow significant that I notice it— and it is beautiful. The household is awake and enjoying an unscheduled silent reading time in the living room. The sun is shining and my heart is at peace. 

Yesterday was a visit to my daughter Talia’s new house that included a walk to nearby McClaren Park and watching a coyote poised at a gopher hole, engaging in a quite beautiful and graceful dance trying to dig up his dinner. (He failed.) Then playing a game of POISON at the nearby basketball court. (Hilarious!) Back to the house for the raspberry cake granddaughter Zadie baked. (Delicious!) We played a word game called Blank Slate and then drove to the Arboretum for a dazzling (and expensive!) light show. Dinner out at Pacific Catch and now Thanksgiving morning. 

 

One thing about Thanksgiving (and other holidays) is its invitation to remember where you were and who you were with at other Thanksgivings in your life. It’s a bittersweet exercise, bitter from calling up those no longer with us who we achingly miss or those we became estranged from or lost touch with or remembering a former self who might have been happier than our present self. Sweet to remember those we were blessed to walk with at those times or feel released from an unhappier former self. 

 

It all brings up the sorrow of those who were here last Thanksgiving and now are not, to feel the empathetic sadness of their families spending their first Thanksgiving without them. And since all things comes in pairs, it is a good reminder to savor yet more deeply those still by our side at the table or imaginatively by our side at tables throughout the country. 

 

The other day, walking in downtown San Francisco with my grandkids by my side, I spontaneously said out loud “I love this life.” It was quiet enough that I don’t think they heard it, but it surprised me when I said it and I felt it as deeply as one can. So thinking about a poem or quote to share when we say grace later today, I settled on a passage from that eloquent writer Niall Williams from his book This Is Happiness. 

 

“… I came to understand that you could stop at, not all, but most of the moments of your life, stop for one heartbeat and, no matter what the state of your head or heart, say This is happiness, because of the simple truth that you were alive to say it. …We can all pause right here, raise our heads, take a breath and accept that This is happiness.”

 

Enjoy your meal.