I've been thinking about when it’s okay to be happy.
Hi, I’m Rick Thyne and I’m grateful that you found your way to these pages. Perhaps in these conversations we’ll find our way to more of the common good that is - for me - our best hope for a future in which all of us thrive. If you've found this column and would like to get my latest column delivered, free, to your inbox every two weeks, you can subscribe at the bottom of this page.
I've been thinking about when, in our current horrible circumstances, it’s okay to be happy.
On the pediatrics unit in the hospital where our daughter works, the surge of children with Covid recently doubled each week for four weeks. This same Delta variant surge has spoiled our early-summer national hope that we were nearing whatever our new normal would be; now several states are out of hospital beds and once again deaths are rising. For eighteen months, we haven’t gathered with our friends in restaurants, bars, places of worship, concerts, sporting events; even now we’re barely inching our way back toward one another.
Getting out of Afghanistan was a deadly mess on both sides, however necessary our exit from twenty years of the forever war. Washington politics seems increasingly like kids in a sand fight. In California and now in Oregon, Washington and Colorado, fires are torching the earth and marring the sky with smoke that drifts all the way to the Atlantic. Beneath all these disasters is the looming suspicion that things may not, in fact, get better.
Anthony, Laura. (2021. May 03). 'Like Armageddon': California's 2021 wildfire season could be extreme, state officials warn. ABC News.
Given these realities, it feels obscene to admit that on several recent occasions I’ve been joyously happy. Should I keep my happiness a secret and, in the midst of so much widespread suffering, recognize the shame that should accompany such an admission?
Still, my joy is abundant, uncontainable.
My 47-year-old friend, married father of two teenage daughters, just made it through heart- transplant surgery. Not surgery on his damaged heart, but a new heart that, after two months of balking, is now beating rhythmically. He’s breathing normally for the first time in years, just spent the night with his family for the first time in four months, and there is hopeful laughter in his voice, and in his wife’s. I laugh along with them every time we speak.
My grandson and a group of his sixteen-year-old friends trekked through the California Sierras until they reached Mt. Whitney, the highest peak on the continent. I climbed it twice in my teens, so I’ve been nostalgically thrilled to follow his preparations and to wish him well as their journey began. When word came that they topped the peak, I was swollen with the pleasure of his success and the memories of my own.
Mount Whitney, Sierra Nevada
I was part of a crowd of 350 friends and family who could finally gather in the early evening on a recent Saturday to celebrate the life of our friend sixteen months after his death. His wife and two sons spoke, as did three of his best friends. Each of them went well beyond their allotted time because they were brimming over with tales of Rod’s courage during a decade of battling cancer, quips about his classic car collection and his love of country music, and incident upon incident of his indelible impact on each of us. I was happy throughout the long September evening.
In 2005, Jack Gilbert published a book of his poems, REFUSING HEAVEN, which includes the poem, A Brief for the Defense. I’ve read the poem dozens of times and have kept it beside me through this Covid plague. Gilbert has his own description of how bad things always are: if babies are not starving someplace, he writes, they are starving somewhere else, with flies in their nostrils. But even, and maybe especially, in the face of such suffering, he insists
We must have the stubbornness to accept our gladness
in the ruthless furnace of this world.
To make injustice the only
measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.
Refusing Heaven. Jack Gilbert. (2005).
If we cannot step out of the ruthless furnace of bad news; if we cannot accept our gladness in moments of delight, then Covid wins, wars win, isolation wins, sorrow wins. Our gladness is consumed in the Devil’s furnace.
So how do we respect the horror without succumbing to it? How do we accept our gladness without diminishing the encompassing pain?
Sarah Winter was one of a handful of memorable teachers I’ve had throughout my life. She taught Adult Development in my Master’s program in psychology. Near the end of the semester, she summed up her beliefs about what it takes to be a mature adult. At the top of her list of adult virtues is the ability to live with ambivalence, to be able and willing to hold two conflicting beliefs or feelings without having to resolve the tension. My wife describes this as the ability to live in the fog of gray, refusing to insist that things be either black or white.
At this point in my life I recognize that there are many circumstances in which I say, in all honesty, I’m not sure, or I don’t know, or I cannot figure this one out. I’m commonly uncertain. So I rock between opposites, wishing to be certain of one thing or the other but having to admit, frankly, that what’s right or smart or fair or beautiful often isn’t that clear. I live in the gray fog of ambivalence.
That’s where I find myself today, facing the horrors of the ruthless furnace, yet brimming over with the gladness that comes in moments of triumph or delight. These horrors are the day by day canopy under which we live, the constant storm of bad news that demands our attention. Which is why we have to be conscientious (or to steal Gilbert’s word, stubborn) in seizing those moments of joy that come - if only to spite the Devil.