‘HAppiness found her like a train on a track,” sings Florence Welch in Dog Days. When I first heard this song, it hit me with the power of a train engine, the shock of recognition. Luck found me late. Until my early 20s, misery was my guide, and when happiness became my companion, I distrusted it. For years I watched it closely, certain that it would leave me and restore my life to its natural state, the state I had pulled myself out of.
Luckily I had a complicated relationship.
I was unhappy until my mid-20s. I was unhappy when I was skinny and when I wasn’t. I was unhappy in love and unhappy when performing and when contracts ended. There were two places I could count on happiness to appear: when I danced, which always resulted in an endorphin-rich state of happiness, and when I started writing. Luck has really moved in its suitcases. I was 25 when my first play was produced by a theater company I had wanted to join for a long time – but it was the work itself that made me happy. Sitting alone with my fingers on keys, the scratching of a pen on paper, waking up in the dark to reach for the words that came to me in my sleep. That was luck.
When my children were young, I was once sitting in the sun with a friend in my garden in Oxford. I lived in a house in a beautiful city that provided me with a fancy educational institution, I had childcare paid for by the Royal Literary Fund, I was married to someone I adored. My life was full of happiness, but I couldn’t fully trust him. I said to my boyfriend, “If I’m too happy, I’m sure the universe will take it from me that I have to pay for it.” To be honest, I thought my boyfriend would laugh with approval – surely everyone does felt? Instead, she responded with mystified pity.
About three years ago I realized that I had lived more years with happiness than without it. Maybe, I thought, it was time to accept that it was living with me now. That I deserved it. That it wouldn’t leave me
And then – well, we all know what happened next. The pandemic has reminded me how out of control I have, that’s what happened.
In the beginning it was a pleasure. Calm! Reading! City walks! What have people complained about?
I returned to the love of my youth – roller dancing, this time without the little dresses. The body has always made me happy. Dancing, running, kayaking, practicing yoga. I am ashamed to say that I have taken these pleasures for granted. Every day in lockdown, with the Black Pumas in my ears and my quads on my feet, I dived and weaved at my local skate park; and every time I laced my skates, I was happy.
Then, earlier this year, a series of injuries meant those joys were no longer available to me. The simple reset of happiness in moving my body, the habit I had relied on, was removed and I felt unhappy frequently. As a result, I had to reconsider what I thought was an easy question: what makes me happy?
I tried to find it, digging for it, running towards it.
The first moments of returning to the theater or concert as a spectator: bliss. Oh yes, I thought, here is happiness. Or those other moments of intense happiness: my children returning from university and their post-Covid travels; dinner with friends; Laughing with my beloved partner. But it was slippery and would fall out of my hand if I tried too hard.
I started writing this in a café in a shady square in the Spanish sun. I thought my answer would be simple: Speaking Spanish makes me happy. Being in Spain makes me happy. No, I thought: learning things makes me happy. I’m happy when I learn to sail, climb or dance. I’m happy when I try.
As soon as my hands started moving across the keyboard, it was there, like a train on a track. Happiness. Ah, I thought. It’s work that makes me happy. Purpose. Context. But then when I tried to replicate it, like an engine rushing by, it was gone.
In fact, I was looking in the wrong place or in the wrong direction. All those years of that happiness sitting next to me while I distrusted it, my focus was on the people I loved, or the music to my ears, or the words that fell on the page.
It turns out that for me, and maybe you too, running from happiness is a bit like running from a rainbow. You have to blink sideways at it, find it as a by-product of focusing on something else: learning, doing, connecting.
And then, there it is, a stroke of luck shimmering by your side.
