holds upon happiness

“What beautiful hyacinths! I have just learnt to love a hyacinth.”

“And how might you learn? By accident or argument?”

“Your sister taught me; I cannot tell how. Mrs. Allen used to take pains, year after year, to make me like them; but I never could, till I saw them the other day in Milsom Street; I am naturally indifferent about flowers.”

“But now you love a hyacinth. So much the better. You have gained a new source of enjoyment, and it is well to have as many holds upon happiness as possible."

--Catherine Morland and Henry Tilney in Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey

Some things that I love doing are . . .

Having tea time with my roommate Michelle and anyone else who decides to join us.

Cleaning a room.

Eating chocolate. Or ice cream. Or guacamole with lime chips. Or salsa with lime chips. Or Thai food. Food brings me lots and lots of happiness.

Teaching at BYU.

Meeting with students to discuss their concerns about class and life.

Reading. I've long loved reading novels, but recent years have taught me to love reading poetry, compositional and rheotrical theory, nonfiction, and the news (especially opinion pieces).

Listening to NPR, the Mormon Channel, and other podcasts.

Sitting outside in the hour before sunset.

Being awake in the still of the early morning.

Talking with my family.

Sitting in the Celestial Room of any temple.

Emailing and receiving emails from my family (oh those delightful family email chains . . . ).

Visiting cemeteries. (I learned this one over the summer while visiting cemeteries in Massachusetts, Europe, and small Utah towns. Thanks, Sam.)

Writing journal entries, lists, thank you notes, blog posts, and, yes, even assignment sheets.

Getting absorbed in a meaningful conversation.

Laughing with good friends.

Listening in on strangers' conversations.

Browsing through books in a bookstore, touching the spines and feeling the pages, hmmming and smiling over the excerpts I read.

To me, each of these things is about an experience of calm. All of them cause me to slow down and reflect on how rich and good my life actually is and how kind and wonderful the people are around me really are and how numerous and personal my gifts from God have been. And maybe that's what happiness is? The experience of stopping to see the reality of the good God has woven into your life?

This e. e. cummings' poem captures my gratitude for these experiences well:

i thank You God for most this amazing 

day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees 

and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything 

which is natural which is infinite which is yes 

Yes.

Thunderstorms

Tonight, when dark storm clouds gathered over Provo, I got excited. I saw lightning in the distance, and I waited for the sound of thunder that always follows and . . . nothing.

FYI: I really like summer thunderstorms. One of my earliest memories involves dancing in a thunderstorm outside my home when I was about six. My then seven-year-old older brother was frantically trying to get me to come inside because he thought I was going to get struck by lightning, but I ignored him. I just kept playing in it.

When I was a kid, after summer thunderstorms, I liked to make paper boats and float them in the gutter. (Who am I kidding: I still like doing that.)

When I was sixteen, I wrote a poem about thunderstorms for my high school English class. I would type it up for you all, but most of us should forget and bury the poetry we wrote in high school, and it's one of those sixteen-year-old poems that one should keep to one's self.

So, yeah, I like thunderstorms. So when I saw lightning but heard no thunder, I was a little bummed.

I suppose the lightning was too far away tonight for me to hear the thunder, but still. The idea of a summer thunderstorm hitting was almost making up for the weird, odd, somewhat disappointing things that happened today. I was hoping the storm would just burst and make my day better, but it didn't. Just some promising looking wind, dark clouds, and that distant lightning without thunder.

I went inside, took care of a few things, knew I should go to bed (I have to get up at 5:30 most mornings), but couldn't resist going on a quick walk just to see if the storm was growing a little bit. I walked out at about 10pm: it was warm (good sign), almost smelled like a thunderstorm (another good sign), but skies were mostly clear (bad sign).

A minute or two in my walk, however, it happened. Big rain drops. Big loud rain drops. I looked up and saw a star-filled sky with only a few clouds. There were visible stars out, and yet rain was falling! I'm sure the wind was blowing the raindrops off course, but it looked like they were falling directly from the clear part of the sky, not the cloudy part.

It made my whole day.

Unfortunately, the rain never got going in earnest. It stopped completely after about two minutes.

Then the wind picked up, and I had an allergy attack.

But for those two minutes, things were good.

Being late

Yesterday, I left for school twenty minutes before my class started. My apartment is about a five-minute drive from campus, so this seemed like plenty of time to park and then walk the seven or eight minutes to my classroom. I drove quickly to campus, and then made a hopeless run through the lot by the Tanner building, where there is nearly never a spot open between the hours of 9:00am and 12:00pm. I was right to feel hopeless. There was no spot. It is my habit, however, to go through this hopeless ritual before heading to the law school parking lot where I know I can always find a spot.

Not disgruntled, I headed towards the law school. To my dismay, however, I saw that the parking lot was full to the brim. Other graduate students were circling the lot like vultures. Slight panic set in because I remembered that the last and only time this lot was full, I drove through five student lots south of campus for half an hour, trying to find a place to park, and was a half hour late to class. In an attempt to avoid a repeat of that disaster, I decided to try the student lots north of campus. This meant heading back in the direction of my apartment, which made me realize that I might as well have walked that day, but oh well.

Because of fun construction, I parked rather closer to the Harmon building than the Marriott, and then began the trek (in high heels, by the way), realizing that I would probably be fifteen minutes late to class. Being late to class as a graduate student is about one million times worse than being late to class as an undergrad. Not only are your classes smaller, but the door is typically behind the professor, so you have to walk in while everyone stares at you. Worse than that, however, is the perception of lateness as a graduate student. Walking in late as an undergrad is irresponsible, but semi-understandable--especially if it doesn't happen everyday. Walking in late as a graduate student is beyond "irresponsible," well into the realm of "completely unprofessional," and very nearly approaching "you have no future in this field."

The depressing reality of being completely unprofessional was weighing on me when I reached the Marriott center. At that point, a nice young man driving a golf-cart (the ones they give campus tours on) pulled up beside me and said, "Are you going to campus? Do you need a ride?" It was a godsend. Rather than being fifteen minutes late, I was only five minutes late. In graduate school realm, this is a much more excusable level of lateness. While still bad, the perception might just be that you were caught up in pondering the profundities of Romanticism, and lost track of Reality, until you suddenly realized it was 10:30am, and ran to class in true absent-minded, brilliant scholar fashion.

Thank you, golf-cart driver, for saving my reputation as a graduate student, and my feet from a fifteen minute walk in high-heels. That was my tender mercy of the day.