Find ecstasy in life; the mere sense of living is joy enough.
Emily Dickinson
I’ve spent the better part of the last seventeen months in my house. It has been both a privilege for which I am deeply grateful, and a source of helpless frustration for all the while as I’ve stared at the same four walls and walked the same wood floors and slept beneath the same dusty chandelier, the world outside has been burning. I am generally a happy person, though prone to anxiety and catastrophic thinking, even when there is no definitive reason for it. There has been little cause for happiness of late, and more than enough reason to worry.
It seems impossible under such circumstances to hope for joy, to say nothing of the guilt in seeking it when so many have lost so much, but of all the lessons these seventeen months have forced me to learn, it is that joy is essential, else living is just surviving, and it is not as difficult to find as one might suppose when faced with such tremendous fear and futility. In fact, it is in the face of such demons that our defiance to yield becomes our joy.
Through this defiance, I discovered happiness in the small and insignificant, and in things that I had forgotten, or pushed aside, casualties of a life that drives one to exhaustion: An evening hike; a trip to the farmer’s market; the weeding of a vegetable patch; the brewing of a cup of tea. I listened to albums in their entirety, and spent hours working on a puzzle, a thing I have not done since childhood. I rolled my own beeswax candles and collected moth wings and Mabon bags and botanical prints, littering my workspace with them not because they served any real function, but because I liked to look at them. And I started collecting crystal champagne coupes even though they are impossible not to spill from, because they are also impossibly beautiful.
Perhaps the most wondrous of these discoveries old and new was the rekindling of my love of reading. Since becoming an author, particularly one with contracts and deadlines and expectations, I’ve set less and less time aside for the stories of others in order to write stories for others. What a marvelous thing it has been to become reacquainted with books again, to find those which captivate you so fully that there is a certain sort of heartbreak at their ending.
Best of all, I have spent untold hours with my family, sometimes in laughter and sometimes in easy silence, and it has been all the sweeter for knowing how precious it truly is. Difficult times bury some, but for others, they are the blindfold that heightens the senses, the rush of adrenaline that accompanies a brush with danger, reminding us of the precarious nature of life, and to cherish it.
I have spent the better part of seventeen months in my house, and I am certain I will spend many more here as the world continues to burn and I continue to defy. Someday, when we are past this, if we are ever past this, I will seek joy outside these four walls. Until then, within these four walls, I will find joy in a life well lived.
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