OleopteneA blog for Mara Collins

Sympathetic Joy

January 13th, 2009

My friend Patrick’s blog has been the site of a discussion of compassion that morphed into a discussion of whether feeling happiness with others is a form of compassion and also whether you can have compassion for yourself, much more worth checking out than anything on my blog today. But I thought that just in case anyone wants to practice sympathethic joy I should present an all but completely trivial list of things that have made me happy in the last two days.

1) The Fugees’ song “Ready or Not.” It’s the Enya sampling, I think, only I like this song better than I like Enya or most hip hop, have listened to it maybe too many times today. Maybe an antidote to crying to too many Dar Williams’ songs?

2) Realizing that the answer to not being able to find women’s jeans in a comfortable cut, that is, ones that do not allow a draft in back whenever I sit down, and do not cut cruelly right under my belly, while being at the same time a size that I can slide them off without unbuttoning them, is, in fact, right under my nose, why didn’t I think of this two years ago, men’s jeans. And hauling myself to Goodwill where in the matter of the minutes that Rainer could be patient with me shopping, I was able to find and try on three pairs of jeans in the men’s section that are comfortable and require no tugging, all for under thirty dollars.

3) Watching the five-year-old son of friends so that they could meet with the realtor, preparatory to their moving here (joy!), and his playing not alongside but actually WITH Rainer, the two boys inventing their own imaginary world. This is a new sort of friendship for Rainer, one I find exciting to watch.

4) Shamelessly materialistically, I am taking joy in my boots. And my big green coat. Which I cannot tell doesn’t make me look like a homeless person wearing a bathrobe around downtown, only women I don’t know will stop me to tell me that they love my coat. Which is good because I like wearing it. It has one capacious pocket big enough for pocketbook, keys, iPhone, chapstick and a paperback, so I am not bothering with any sort of purse, and thus not only am I not tugging on jeans, I am not messing with purse straps, pushing them back up on my shoulders, dealing with the purse swinging in the way of things I want to do. A tiny thing but it counts.

5) The Archers podcast.

6) Having stumbled by some accidental combination of product, meteorological conditions, and alignments of the stars into hair that behaves as if it were curly and not merely frizzy. I still don’t think of myself as having curly hair, because in New Mexico’s dry air, it just isn’t. It may be the most superficial of joys (well except maybe the boots and the coat) but a good hair day is not to be underestimated, and I even overcome my discomfort with pictures of myself to give you the awful computer-camera picture as evidence:

7) I’m going to Texas this weekend, Raven’s kidneys willing!

With the exception of the trip to visit friends this weekend, and the joy at the friends who are moving here, I find the things on this list a little embarrassing, except that two weeks ago NOTHING was making me happy, and being made happy by any one of these, much less all of them seems like grace. Without counting on it lasting, I have to say I like this happiness thing. I feel sort of self-contained, like there’s music inside me again, and like I have a little more resilience, and the strength to keep getting up and trying.

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