Lately, a couple of genuinely well-meaning people have expressed concern to Nick that I may not be happy here.
First of all, respectfully: knock it off. I appreciate the spirit in which it is meant, but it has led Nick to suggest that there might be things that I’m not telling him, and that is a direction that this relationship will not be going in.
Secondly, and more to the point, it’s made me think of a class that I took during undergrad that was all about happiness. One of our homework assignments–the best, to date, that I have ever done–was to spend half an hour or so trying to make ourselves happy, using nothing external.
The professor asked me to read my write-up aloud, and then asked a young man named Ethan to read his. We had both succeeded, but the similarities ended there: I created a specific visualization, and found that it reliably made me smile, reduced my tension, and raised my energy level. What I mean is this: I pictured something and got kinda bubbly (I had forgotten it for years until today, but it still works). Ethan, on the other hand, sat back and emptied his mind, and let satisfaction roll in. It was much quieter–sort of a sense of contentment.
We both said the same thing: “After hearing yours, I’m not sure I did it right” (and we both managed to get a little envy into the sentence). The professor suggested something different: it seemed to him like a state/trait issue. I had created a state of happiness, while Ethan had gotten in touch with it on the trait level–quieter, but deeper and more enduring.
My state happiness is on the fritz. It has been for a while, and moving to a foreign country was not likely to improve it much–certainly not at first, anyway. There are a million bright spots that make me laugh, and a million tiny pinprick frustrations that make me want to hide under the covers and never come out again. I don’t sound any happier, is what I mean.
But I am.
My trait happiness–the steady baseline–has shot up, and most of that is undoubtedly being with Nick, but some of it is also being with Nick in Paris, because it’s really cool.
Forget for a minute that the neurotic tics that were threatening to seriously invade my life (if anyone had taken my blood pressure in the subway during the last few months, they’d've been calling paramedics next thing, for example, and there are plenty of others) have all but vanished.
I spend half the day now restraining myself from asking people if I can take pictures of their children, or their dogs, or just of them, so that I can remember and write about what they said and what they wore and the silly thing they did or whatever. I have gariguettes on demand. I climbed the Eiffel Tower today–did you think I was kidding about the fitness plan?–and spotted my apartment from the second level.
Look:
There’s me, because there’s sort of an unwritten code among tourists in places like that that says you just offer to take pictures for people (and I did it, too). A couple of very nice Spanish girls took that for me when they saw me take out the camera to shoot this:
which I messed up because the sun was in my eyes. I meant to shoot a little further to the right, so the apartment’s not in it, but since I had no intention of figuring out how to draw a big arrow or circle or whatever on the photo, you were just going to have to take my word for it, anyway.
Oh, and from earlier today, I’ve got a couple of shots of the market on our corner (Tuesdays and Fridays)–or of what was left of it, anyway, by the time I came back from shopping a few streets up. I liked the way it looked, half-struck.
Also, here’s a French duck (Mary, I was strolling along the Seine for you):
And so, after my Eiffel Tower run, I hung out for a bit in the park underneath and people-watched. My camera wasn’t working when the group of kids came by wearing bilingual signs that said “FREE HUGS” (people seemed charmed, and a bunch took them up on it–there really didn’t seem to be a catch. It may be a French thing). But I couldn’t help but smile when a 10-year-old American girl, strolling with classmates, looked over toward the tower and announced, “Oh! I love that tree!” As it turns out, I did, too, so here it is:
