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Omgggg stoppppp.
That was my reaction this morning to whatever it is it’s doing outside. Those little peeks of grass were really getting me through, Nexties. “Just a few more weeks of this,” I kept muttering to my dog, Phoebe, every time we’d crash through an ice-covered puddle or she’d have to be airlifted into the bathtub for her second or third rinse of the day.
So to see all that snow-blanketed grass — all that progress undone — was like opening up a Word doc and being confronted with a blank page where words used to be.
Snow falls as pedestrians make their way through the Exchange District Wednesday morning. (Mike Deal / Free Press)
Winter has felt particularly endless this year, but things are also rough out there globally.
Big April 2020 vibes, to be honest, that same strange mix of hyper vigilance and monotony. You’re trying to wrap your mind around a madman threatening to blow up Iran (not yesterday, but maybe in two weeks), but you also still need to do your taxes and you still need to figure out what’s for dinner and you still need to walk the dog.
Happiness, these days, feels like it’s in short supply.
So, my conversation with author/podcaster/historian/Winnipegger Kate Bowler in last week’s paper came at precisely the right time.
She was in Winnipeg to promote her latest book, Joyful, Anyway, which is about cultivating joy despite it all. If you know Bowler’s work, then you know she doesn’t go in for Live, Laugh, Love platitudes or toxic positivity; she knows life is hard and beautiful and terrible and mundane and wonderful and she wants people to know that, too.
During our interview, I asked her about the difference between happiness and joy, which, as it turns out, are not synonyms. As she explained it, happiness is an accumulated sense of things going your way. It comes from the Norse ‘happ’ meaning happenstance.
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She went on: “Having looked at this Good Vibes Only culture, I just wondered, honestly, if there was a kind of fragility to the way we were talking about happiness, that if it’s built out of so many five-step plans to drink more water, write in your gratitude journal and do your breathing app, why is it that there’s such a fear and intensity underneath it? And I think it’s because happiness is really just a different way of describing luck.
“I think that’s why I was so excited to learn that joy is this bright, big, enlivening feeling that can co-exist with both our reward systems, like our dopamine, but also our stress systems, which explains why even in the worst times you can still somehow find that joy is increasing your capacity to live inside your reality. And those are the kinds of virtues that I’m very interested in right now. Things that help us live more beautifully inside of what is, instead of imagining we can escape it.”
And so, in the spirit of living more beautifully inside of what is, I took Pheebs out for a walk this morning. I tried, very hard, to be a hero with a nice attitude and see the morning through her eyes because that dog loves snow.
Phoebe’s joy in fresh snowfall is contagious. (Jen Zoratti / Free Press)
She absolutely plowed through it. She snuffled around in it and kicked up drifts of it. She was having a great time. And, after a while, I was too. It wasn’t cold out. The mature elms, blasted with white, looked so beautiful — even if it is APRIL — that I snapped a few pics of them. I laughed at my silly little pup. And you know what? The walk ended up being joyful, anyway.
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