Fleeting Happiness
Reflecting on a moment of connection and vulnerability
In the poem titled “The Obligation to be Happy” by Linda Pastan, she writes:
“It is more onerous than the right of beauty or housework, harder than love. But you expect it of me casually. Like you expect the sun to come up, not in spite of the rain and the clouds but because of them.”
What causes a sense of happiness? What sets into action the warm feeling that washes over us as we experience a boost in our internal systems that we label “happy”? To me, connection is what sets these waves into action.
In my first year of teaching at Coconino High School in Flagstaff, Arizona at the tender age of 22 and newly married, I had my sophomore and junior students (ages 16-17), memorize poems of their choice and recite the poems in front of the class with feeling for National Poetry Month in April. You guessed right that when I introduced the assignment to them they all groaned miserably, their unhappiness and unease vibrating against the bright, citrus orange painted walls of my classroom. And so, to quell their discomfort, I promised to memorize a poem and present it to them in solidarity and demonstration. This made them buy in (I was only a few years older than them of course) and they loved watching me practice in front of them, putting my full vulnerability in the spotlight.
Poetry, though many like to grumble about not liking it, is so vulnerable. So ridiculously exposing of the human heart and soul. We, collectively, feel comfortable singing lyrics along to music because it covers up some of the openness with the distraction of sound and vibration, but when we are forced to use our solitary voice to read such raw emotion, we get uncomfortable. Squirmy. That’s why so many people claim to not like poetry. But reciting poetry in front of my high school students unleashed an energy in the room that I haven’t been able to replicate exactly since.
I squirmed in front of my students as I recited these lines by heart after practicing every day (in front of the mirror, before bed, to Radar, etc.), but, by the day of presentations I was ready to go. I went first. We turned off the lights, turned on our battery-run candles, and a hush fell over the room. My voice shook in all the right places in the poem, it got deeper when it was right, and higher when the tone changed. And when I spoke the last few lines, “Happiness. I try to hoist it on my narrow shoulders again—a knapsack heavy with gold coins…only Midas would understand”, it was silent in the room. A hush, a veil, a common feeling of shared experience had connected us as one in that moment. I felt the tears welling in my eyes, the warmth engulfing my body.
And after that momentary pause, there was a clamor of excitement. Who would go next? “Why can’t it be me?!” One student moaned. There wasn’t enough time in the class for everyone to go, why couldn’t the period be extended? Each speaker after me held the room in the same kind of suspended animation that I had and each poem was followed with a reverent silence and then a fight for who would be next.
The happiness I felt in that period of time, not only as a new teacher, but as a fellow human-thinker and feeler in that room is unparalleled. There is nothing I crave more on this earth than connection and vulnerability. I crave it. And in that moment, the joy in me was palpable. There have been a few repeated moments like this in my decade of teaching (each with it’s own unique imprint), but every time I think of this first moment experiencing it as “the leader” in the room, it’s almost indescribable.
The speaker in the poem explains how much pressure we put on each other to be “happy” and how being “happy” is the most difficult thing for a human to do. We so flippantly say to each other “be happy!” Which always has the opposite effect. When we expect happiness of each other we often dampen it. It was when I put my full vulnerability cloak on (because, yes, it is a super power in the right situation), that happiness came unbridled to all of us in the room. It was catching, contagious even. Students who weren’t interested in poetry at all suddenly wanted to share, to be the leader in the movement of conscious support of one another in the room. And to see that in teenagers was, and still is, moving. We all just want to be loved and understood. Poetry, the written and spoken words of the heart, allow for us to embody our souls for a moment, to be seen, and it makes us deeply happy.
It is fleeting. But like the speaker in the poem reminds us, we are happy “not in spite of the clouds and rain but because of them”. We don’t have these intense moments of connection all the time, it makes them all the more sweet when we do. When we go in search of these moments and try to manufacture them they come out artificial, forced, cringe. So, like Midas, we hoard the moments and may not know how to create the moments for ourselves, without help, without a nudge.
Enter the poets of the world to do the soul’s work.
To expose and lay raw the human soul. There is no poem I can read that doesn’t bring me a tremble or a pressure to the back of the eye, threatening to bring salty tear to a seemingly mundane moment.
And so if “health and love are brief irrelevancies” (Pastan) so too are these moments in time. These connections.
Cherish them and dream of them.
To be in a moment
Of despair feels long
Everlasting
And the glimmer of the laughter
So short
What makes them
Gold
Shortens them
Egging us to pull the string
To tug on the heartstrings
Of oneself
And toss it to a friend.
