Snow last night and the big moon did not wake me up. Winter seems to wrap us in her arms like a mother on a train platform as the train bell rings and the pistons begins to chug. Surely spring will come someday.

But Dot loves the snow. She has the zoomies all morning: running in circles and sliding on her back. She eats snow with abandon. Then she rushes to the beach and picks mussels off the rocks and brings them up and packs them in the snow and throws them into the air and eventually eats everything, snow, shells and mussel all together. She is joyful today. Tiny flakes continue to fall on her black coat and she snaps at them hopping and bucking like a horse before she takes off on another circuit around the house, around the yard then around me, before she comes and sits on my feet and snuggles against my legs. Now she is asleep in her crate. Where before, when I was making the recording I could not get her anywhere near her crate.

Some scientists say that happiness is a simple formula of neurochemistry. Hormones from exercise, or meditation, religious teaching can line up the synapses and create happiness, and if not joy, at least a predisposition toward happiness rather than despair. Others are the opposite, predisposed to melancholy and not joy. I think this is fairly obvious. I myself have undergone Ketamine therapy in the last year and I’m certain that it has changed my predisposition. I am no longer tilted toward melancholy and despair. I can be what I call, “appropriately sad” but not the narcissistic kink of sad which wants to pile on unhappiness as if it is a kind of a virtue. Neither am I particularly “sunny” who sees the good in everyone and every situation. But how do we come to find a balance, particularly in a time like this, which is frightening and potentially dire?

I don’t know, for certain how to encourage happiness in this time of sickness and isolation but I try and look to the things that are free and right in front of our eyes. I’ve written about things like routine, making the bed, little acts of kindness, cooking, I’m sure I’ve mentioned activity and exercise, walking, reading poetry and playing with your dog. I suppose happiness is related to humor in that it is the ability to look at conflict and see a resolution that ends with a happy if not just plain ridiculous outcome thwarting death.

Okay why did I even have to mention death? Jesus, Mr. Debbie Downer can’t we just forget about death for the duration of this whole ordeal? I’m afraid, we can’t. Nope. Not possible. Death won’t let us, and the reason we are bugging about this whole caronavirus in the first place is because it is deadly. It would be a whole other matter if it was a really, really bad rash… but it’s not. it’s deadly, and it’s stealthy, We don’t know who has it and who is going to give it to us and when. And the other big problem is Death has always been that way.. It has always clouded our dreams, and shaped our humor and our drama. So the first step towards happiness is to accept THAT. Death happens to everything and everyone. Yep…. everyone. Look around. Yep…. yep…. yep… him too, her and her, yep, yep, yep, and of course you too.

I know. It sucks. The only question is when. The other hard thing you might think it’s easier when when you are old. But from my little slice of information. The longer you live and the more you say you are ready to go, just saying it, really has nothing to do with actually being ready to go. Actually being ready to go, I think has to do only comes from immediate physical and unbearable physical pain and not acceptance of death. This two-bit insight comes from asking orderlies who move dead bodies in “rest” homes and they all say that most people’s final expression is with their mouth wide open struggling to take one more breath. So… you can trust that or not, but I think everyone wants to keep living no matter what they say or how old they are.

I know I want to live, but still we try to prepare our selves for death. That’s what jokes are all about, and poetry, and a lot of damn good books, and a lot of our troubling dreams. So… what I’m saying is it’s gonna happen. It was always gonna happen, and that was no different before this goddamn virus or right now in the middle of it. Not that there is a whole lot of other stuff we can’t worry about, say the collapse of our sacred institutions like Democracy but hey, there is an argument that that was in danger way before this virus too.

So, like that big old fun bag Leo Tolstoy said, “It’s helpless, it’s all helpless. Listen to me, I’m consoling you!” It’s true, once you accept how bleak it really is, things start to look up on a day by day basis. I’m not kidding. The frolicking puppy starts to look like a kind of wondrous miracle, and each moment you get to spend warming your feet between the legs of your partner under clean sheets and an old comforter is nothing short of a religious experience. “Wait a second,” You might say, “what if she has died, or if she has left me and I’m all alone.? Well, I am sorry, but you got to know that joy. That experience is like money in the bank of joyful experience. You can replay it. You can pay it forward to grand children, you can remind them, and yourself that those are the kinds of joys that are worth living for and not the bullshit you see advertised on TV or paraded around on lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. And yes, there is suffering in this life. If Buddhist teachings are to believed all existence suffers, and the only way out of that is to stop wanting it to be otherwise.

But that gets a little mystical. I just don’t think God or Fate or Karma is picking on us now. All I’m saying is that in these uncertain times maybe all we can do is just count our blessings or luck at how lucky we are no matter what our philosophy or faith, and love our neighbor, even if they might not deserve it. Don’t fritter our time away worrying about the “whys?” of death, just keep acting reasonably in trying to keep ourselves and others from getting sick. I honestly think if we can do these things, which is plenty to do by the way, then happiness comes along with all of it.

There you go. John and Dot’s theory of happiness in the time of pandemic.

Spring snow on wet ground,

a clumsy dog running hard

falls into my arms.

jhs

Here is a recording I made in my office this morning. I read the beginning of my book THE BIG BOTH WAYS. Dot was a pain in the butt, she didn’t want to be inside and she didn’t want to be on the porch. I was a bit distracted. Give a listen.