The movie 'Hector and the Search for Happiness' (based on the book by François Lelord), whilst not a cinematic masterpiece, was for me one of those thought-provoking, laugh-inducing and, at times, tear-jerking films that made me consider, long after we had left the theatre, one of the age long questions - What Is Happiness?
In the spirit of 'Eat, Pray, Love', Hector (Simon Pegg), a psychiatrist, leaves the perfectly organised, regimented life he shares with his girlfriend Clara, and sets out to find the meaning of happiness; a journey that will take him to a monastery in China, a hospital in Africa, and to a reunion with his old university 'flame' in Los Angeles. Wherever he goes, he takes a journal where he writes down the lessons learnt from all the people he meets along the way. These characters range from a hideously rich businessman, to a penniless young prostitute, an old wise monk, a dangerous drug dealer, an African grandmother, a world expert in happiness, and a terminally ill woman who is undertaking her last journey. As to be expected, Hector discovers that Happiness means something different to everyone. In the case of the African woman, happiness is as simple as cooking a pot of sweet potato stew and sharing it with her large family. He also discovers that happiness encompasses a range of emotions, including those considered negative; such as sadness, fear and pain. When I think of the elusive concept of happiness, I always remember the lines uttered by Clarissa Vaughan, a character from another movie, 'The Hours' (based on the book by Michael Cunningham) when she admits to her daughter that she hasn’t been happy in a very long time: I remember one morning getting up at dawn, there was such a sense of possibility. You know, that feeling? And I remember thinking to myself "this is the beginning of happiness. This is where it starts. And of course there will always be more." It never occurred to me it wasn't the beginning. It was happiness. It was the moment. Right then... The Hours was not a happy movie, according to the half a dozen people who came with me and who cursed me for months for choosing it; in fact some of them are still holding it against me. But a decade on, I still remember the lesson I took away from it, and find myself constantly catching and enjoying that fleeting moment, which is not the beginning of happiness, but happiness itself, before it’s gone. There are days when I experience several such moments, because happiness lies in the simple, everyday things that we often take for granted. For several years I worked in an “office” which once used to be a garage. It was dark, with the windows painted shut and the walls painted a sickly shade of green. It was hot in summer, cold in winter and generally a depressing place to spend eight hours a day in. My workmate and I used to call it 'the cave' or sometimes 'the dungeon’. One day she had the brilliant idea of sticking a laminated piece of white paper on the door, and we used a black marker to make a list, accompanied by child-like drawings, of all the things that made us happy. Whenever our gloomy surroundings started ‘getting’ to us, we would look at our list and remember the many wonderful things we had in our lives, and we always ended up with a smile on our faces, which in turn made the room brighter. The items contained in the list were amazing in their simplicity: Family, the kindness of strangers, sunrises, sunsets, rainbows, sunny winter days, chocolate, themed birthday parties, writing, air drumming, dancing, singing, holidays, bush walking, gardening… Some people - as Hector finds out - see happiness as permanently in the future; a goal to constantly strive for, which is by default unattainable. Others, like Clarissa Vaughan, feel that their happiness belongs in the past. When Clarissa tells her daughter that the last time she felt genuinely happy was decades ago, her daughter replies ‘what you are saying, is that you were once young.’ I was once young too, and know what it is like to experience that kind of earth shattering happiness. When I was eighteen and in love for the first time, this is what I wrote about it: I am so happy that I even feel angry; I am so happy that I feel like crying out aloud, that my lungs feel like bursting out like a balloon, so happy that I feel impotent at the sight of so much beauty, the nightfall of December, the Christmas lights at the windows, and the music - the ever blessed music - so happy, that I feel dumb in the presence of so much life, that the singing of the birds amongst the leaves is deafening, as deafening as the protest of those who cannot feel this madness. … and so it went for two whole pages. But was this really happiness? Or was it euphoria? We all know what it is like to be 'high'; some people take drugs, others take extreme risks in order to experience that euphoria. I have been high in love, high in lust and even high in anger many a time. But is that happiness? This morning, I woke up with a spring in my step, with that subtle yet exciting feeling of having butterflies in my stomach, for no particular reason. Yes, I had a good night sleep, and it was a beautiful day. But was that enough reason to be happy? I hadn't achieved or acquired anything overnight; nothing was different from yesterday. I decided not to question it. I held onto that feeling and managed to get to the end of the day with ‘it’ still inside me, despite a couple of incidents which generally would have been enough to make my mood plummet. When all is said and done, if we can look back and remember the hours spent enjoying a good book, writing a poem, or gardening with the sun on our backs; and the times of laughter, of joy and even of tears shared with lovers, family and friends, then we can say we have lived a life filled with happiness.
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Recently a friend invited me to her grandson’s christening. It had been a long time since I attended a mass, and I found the sermon extremely stimulating, although not necessarily from a faith perspective. The priest started by showing the infamous ‘selfie’ that President Barack Obama, British Prime Minister David Cameron and Denmark’s Prime Minister Helle Thorning Schmidt took of themselves at Nelson Mandela’s Memorial service (photo credit: AFP PHOTO / ROBERTO SCHMIDT/Getty Images). Even on that solemn occasion, they couldn’t help themselves and succumbed to the temptation of taking a selfie. And they were caught in the act, by another camera!
The priest then showed a ‘selfie’ he took of himself at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem. He said that the ‘selfie’ is our modern way of showing the world that “I was there”, with that famous person, or at that famous place, and I have the photo to prove it. It is our way of ‘witnessing’ events, landmarks, encounters, and, more often than not, trivial moments in our lives. Before the invention of cameras, and more recently, digital cameras, people documented their encounters, travels and experiences by writing them down. The priest referred to the gospels, particularly the gospels written by John and Matthew, who were two of the twelve apostles*, and as such witnessed first-hand the life and deeds of Jesus, the most famous and enduring ‘celebrity’ of all. The gospel writers couldn’t take ‘selfies’ of themselves with Christ, so they wrote everything they saw to document it, and their stories spread like lightening – or in modern terms, they went ‘viral’. Nowadays, with everybody carrying a camera in their pocket, selfies and photographs documenting our lives minute by minute are overloading the media landscape. Facebook posts that don’t include a picture, don’t receive as many ‘likes’. Images are much more likely to be re-twitted than plain text. Media releases with photographs have a much higher chance of being published. We live in a visual era, and words without pictures are often overlooked. People take thousands of photographs of their every trip or special occasion, but how often do they look at, or even download those pictures? When I travelled to Europe in 2003 – still in my 'pre-digital' age – I took a grand total of 144 photographs: six rolls of 24. Nowadays that is a laughable quantity for a three-week tour, but when I returned home and developed the rolls I could hardly remember what photo was taken where. Fortunately, I had taken a comprehensive travel diary as well, describing the places, their history, the people I met at every stop, and other interesting facts. I was able to marry the words and the pictures and the resulting illustrated story was much more detailed and effective in conveying my adventures than the digital photo albums I produce these days, which have a one-line caption per photo and sometimes not even that. A few months ago I was driving back home after work and I witnessed the most incredible rainbow. I thought of taking a photo, but my phone was in my bag and thankfully for the other motorists, I am not very good at multitasking when driving. I felt frustrated at first, but then realised that sometimes we miss the moment by trying to capture it with a camera. I captured it with my eyes, committed it to my memory, and that was enough. I still remember the highlight of my first trip to Adelaide, South Australia, in 2001. In my diary, I recorded Womadelaide (the music festival at the botanical gardens) as one of the highlights; also the day tour to Hahndorf and Victor Harbour, and a cruise down the Murray River. But the biggest highlight of that trip didn't cost a cent: it was the sunset over West Beach on the night of our arrival. It was a hot afternoon and we walked to the beach to cool down. While we were there, the cloudy sky turned into an incredible canvas with a mixture of colours, textures and shapes in constant motion. The sea became a liquid mirror of the sky, reflecting the silver, blue and pink hues of the clouds, and the effect of the sun setting over the water was nothing short of miraculous. People quickly began to arrive, sensing that something momentous was taking place; some of them were even carrying champagne bottles and glasses. We all stood there, in awe, clinking glasses and taking in the landscape with jaws dropped. I cursed myself for not having my camera with me (pre-digital / smart phone era), but then again, a photo would have never paid this moment justice, so I wrote it all down as soon as we returned to our hotel. We went back to the beach at the same time the next day hoping to repeat the experience, with some friends who joined us in the morning, but unfortunately for them the sunset was nothing more than ordinary. Thirteen years later, I don’t remember much about the Hahndorf and Victor Habour excursions or the cruise on the Murray, even though I took copious pictures of those places. But when I read my travel diary, I can instantly recall that sunset, which remains in my mind as one of the most spectacular I have ever seen. To be able to conjure a visual image like that, after all these years, by painting it with words, demonstrates – to me – the supremacy of words against pictures. It might take an hour to write a thousand words (as it did to write this 1000-word blog post), and less than a second to take a picture, but it is time well spent. * Mark and Luke, who wrote the other two gospels, were not part of the twelve apostles – in fact Luke joined the Christian movement after Jesus died; but they researched their stories by interviewing sources who had met and been close to their subject. Why do we write?
Because we have stories to tell, messages to communicate, lessons to impart to others? Because we ‘hear voices’? (As in the voices of characters who are trying to get out of our heads and into the world) Because it’s therapeutic, soothing and fulfilling; a way of working things out, of giving shape to our thoughts, our fears and our dreams? For me, it’s all of the above, and more. Back in 2000, whilst watching Pedro Almodovar’s movie, ‘All About My Mother’ on the big screen, I was blown away by an aerial scene of Barcelona at night. It started from a distance and then zoomed into the city at such vertiginous speed I felt as though I was falling into it, and I would crash-land in the middle of this bright, pulsating metropolis any second. At that moment I felt that this place, with all its beauty and seediness, was calling me.
I don’t know how other people’s minds work, but mine has always been flooded with waves of concurrent thoughts intercepting each other, colliding with each other, contradicting each other, at any given time of any given day. Even when I try to do meditation or yoga, the ‘noise’ in my head refuses to stop. And all my life, I have wanted to know what it would feel like to have my mind empty of thoughts, blissfully silent, even if this lasted for only a few seconds. Inevitably, when my wish eventually came true, it was at the worst possible time: my mind chose to go blank – joyfully devoid of words, thoughts or images – in the middle of a speech I was delivering at a public speaking contest. |
Midnight MusingsAuthorBel Vidal - Débutante novelist (author of Exuberance), blogger, Archives
December 2023
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