Yesterday I went down to my workshop, which I rarely do
anymore, and decided to make something to hold my daughter’s swords. A word of explanation – she’s done some stage
work, and one sword is a professional (albeit plastic) sword for stage combat,
which she is trained to use; the other is a wooden one with a wooden
sheath. Both sit mostly on her dresser,
crowding out those more girlie thingies.
Seemed to me that there could be a better arrangement.
So I thought I’d make a wall rack. I rummaged through the scrap wood and found a
nice piece of maple, just the right
length. I dusted off the router –
reminding myself how to use it – and put a trim edge on the board. I sanded it, and put on a coat of pre-finish
– I’ve learned from experience that maple tends to blotch otherwise. Then I stained it, a nice maple gold. Sanding required me to get out the power
sander, and the pre-staining and staining required label-reading and
brush-finding.
As I puttered around with this absolutely unnecessary and
certainly non-artistic work, I realized I was happy. Not ecstatic, just happy. Maybe content is a better word. I might have even tried to whistle. The happiness
flitted around the edge of my awareness as the project went on, a sort of
byproduct that I was able to notice and let go.
All my deliberate conscious attention was on the project – does this
work? Where did I put that? What would happen if I let my finger slip
into the router? (That last one didn’t
really happen, and I felt no need to test it out). My thinking world shrank to the manageable
technical stuff.
When I reached the point where the stain had to dry, I went upstairs,
and decided to mow the lawn. I wore
earphones and listened to whatever I could find. I ended up with NPR’s “The TED Radio Hour”,
which coincidentally (synchronistically?) had a theme about happiness. One speaker was a researcher who got people
to use an app that periodically asked them a series of questions about what
they were doing, whether they liked it, whether they had to do it, whether they
would rather be doing something else, what they were thinking about when the
app asked, etc. One theme that seemed to
evolve was that people were generally happiest when wholly occupied with what
they are doing, whatever it is.
Something inside me went, “aha.” I have a friend who is a veteran yoga
practitioner, and his theme is mindfulness –focusing on what one is doing,
whatever it is. Because his approach also
involves deep meditation, and I tend to fall asleep when I try to meditate,
I’ve never been able to follow him. I
sometimes try mindfulness on my own, but my mind usually just fills up with
itself, and mind-filled is pretty much the opposite of mindful. So I more or less gave it up as being his
thing, and alternately envy and resent him for it.
But I seem to have tricked myself yesterday. I didn’t go to the workshop to get happy or
to do something important, I went to make something simple. And I stumbled into happiness. I became wholly engrossed in something
manageable and absorbing, focused on it, and happiness grew out of it.
I didn’t transform my life yesterday, and the happiness has
flitted away. But I know where it hides.
