Chapter 10.5 - Making a Talisman (about happiness)

The songs of nature had returned - cheerful birdsong, leaves rustled by the wind, and if one listened carefully, the sounds plants made when they grew, sounds usually unheard by human ears. 

Claire had brought out a blanket and spread it out on the grass of the front lawn to sit on, just like she used to do when she was a child. She welcomed the warmth of the timid spring that lingered around her, barely holding itself together and trying not to get swept away by the occasional gust of wind. The new grass was bright green, and the just open leaf buds on the trees were bright green, and the tall shoots of the water plants that grew around the pond were bright green. For a moment Claire felt she was looking at the world through a giant emerald. 

She listened to the plants grow and her soul got carried away by their stories - the struggle of the grass blades pushing through wet clods of dirt, the worry of the daffodils that they might have emerged too soon, the trees’ relief to feel their sap push through the tips of their fresh leaves. She listened to the plants’ stories.

Grandmother approached her with a shawl, unwilling to entrust her grandchild’s well being to the fancy of the spring sunshine.

“Thank you, maman,” Claire smiled at her.

“Having an early picnic?” Grandmother teased her. 

“No,” the young woman wrapped the shawl around her shoulders and stood up to follow her grandmother to the outdoor table for an impromptu cup of hot cocoa. “Just listening.”

“Listening to what?” Grandmother’s curiosity was stirred.

“The plants,” Claire replied in a very natural tone. 

The table was covered with a thin layer of catkins, the oaks had been really busy planning their offspring.

“And what are they saying?” Grandmother turned towards her, suddenly serious.

Claire gazed at her grandmother half in jest, trying to figure out if the latter really meant it. Grandmother was waiting, all attention.

“Aagh…that they are happy, I guess,” Claire blushed embarrassed. This communing with nature she was blessed to engage in was a very private affair, one too intimate to share, it belonged to her alone. Besides, she didn’t have the words to communicate to people what it meant to her, it was something that one could sense, or rather glimpse through the veil of reality, the life inside of things.

“Happiness,” Grandmother laughed heartily, “that’s a tricky little weasel. It sneaks out on you if you look at it too long.”

People didn’t seek happiness, Claire had learned earlier in life. The driven ones thought happiness was a fake concept invented by those who lacked the strength of character to pursue an actual goal. The disenchanted ones thought of happiness as selfish and sinful, proof that one deprived the world of their share of misery and suffering. Happiness only managed to transcend the day to day hassle under extreme circumstances, like unforeseen luck, or epic love, or triumph, and even then it didn’t last for long, weighed down by the heavy ballast of shoulds and  don’ts which immediately got triggered to seek and destroy it. Happiness couldn’t weather burdens, they were too heavy for its weightless cloud. It could only circumvent them during distracted moments, when the mantle of the world fell off one’s shoulders, but before the feeling that one should feel guilty about it had time to sink in. Happiness! What was that?

“It’s like love, I guess,” Grandmother continued her train of thought. “You know it when you feel it, but if you can’t put it into words without altering its substance. Some things are only meant to be felt, not thought.”

“Like the sounds plants make when they grow,” Claire thought smiling, still feeling the joy of that green world whose sights and sounds she’d been gifted with.

“What are you going to do now that the world officially dubbed you a real artist?” Grandmother brought the young woman back to reality and dropped a bucket of ice water on the shy sprout of happiness that was trying to find its way through the dark pool of Claire’s unconscious to the surface of her thoughts. It shriveled like a mimosa plant and rushed back to the bottom in a hurry, waiting for better timing.

“I don’t know, maman,” Claire provided a vague answer.

“You can’t ‘I don’t know’ your way through life,” Grandmother said, unsettled. “You have to make a plan or something, think things through, stuff doesn’t just fall in your lap, you know.”

“What happened to man proposes, God disposes?” Claire went on the defensive.

“You’re responsible for the proposes part of this saying, bebelle! What do you propose? It better be a list, not an item, so you can account for the disposes side of things,” Grandmother responded.

“But what if things do happen, but not the way I thought they would?” Claire voiced her concerns.

“Let me save you some mental energy and tell you things never happen the way you thought they would. There! Now you don’t have to waste your time worrying about that anymore.”

“But then I won’t be happy!” Claire exclaimed.

“Why on earth would you tie your happiness to the whims of the world? It’s like hitching your wagon to a billy-goat! The world will make you glad. It will make you sad. It will make you mad. It will not make you happy. Tying happiness to things that don’t last and over which you have no control is the very reason why it is so hard to achieve. If you don’t mind me asking, weren’t you happy earlier?”

“Yes.”

“Did you have any particular reason to be happy?” 

“The weather is nice, spring is beautiful,” Claire started enumerating.

“But you were also happy with the fog earlier this winter,” Grandmother reminded her. “I’m not going to comment on that one, to each his own.”

“I guess I’m usually happy in nature, no matter what the weather.”

“And now you’ve gotten one step closer to being truly happy. You know how placebo works? If you believe you are taking medicine your own body starts to produce endorphins which actually soothe your ailment. It works the same with feelings. It can be as easy as making yourself a happiness rock: you now have a peg to hang your happiness on. Every time you feel that rock in your hand, you remember it is about you being happy. You have tied happiness to something you can always reach, something right inside your pocket. Short of tragic circumstances you can draw happiness from that rock any time you want, just because you choose to do so, and that is your ultimate affirmation of free will. People never believe they can decide how they want to feel, but they sure can, most of the time.

Happiness works because it works, and you believe it works because it worked before because you decided to believe it would. This is a rational person’s worst nightmare, but if it turns sadness into joy even once it is worth a million times more than the rational argument against it. The rational argument makes you despair. The irrational one makes you happy. Even rational people can condescend to this logic.”

“So, what happens if you lose your rock?” Claire followed the logic of the argument.

“You can always make yourself another one,” Grandmother burst out laughing. “That’s the beauty of it: there will never be a shortage of rocks in this world. But about the planning. When are you going to start laying out what you want to do with your life?”

“Why? You said it yourself it’s not going to make me happy.”

“Of course it won’t. But now that your happiness is going to wield itself instead of being determined by whatever may or may not work out, you won’t have it interfering with your propositions anymore. It’s an aside.”

“I don’t understand. Why bother attempting to do something if not for the hope that it would make me happy?”

“Because you can.”