joy, in trouble

Joy can be complicated. When you're a kid, you dont think much about it. You're giddy with joy when they announce a snow day (closed schools). You bubble over with excitement the night before Christmas or before your birthday. You clap your hands with glee when your grandma says yes to ice cream or french fries after school. Then comes teen angst and doubt trickles in. Am I really happy? What does it mean to be happy? Why am I not happy? And when you're an overwhelmed working parent, you understand that joy comes in fleeting spurts: a free hour to yourself, a snuggle with your kid over a good book, the end of school and thus the end of homework nagging and lunch making. A work project finished. Time to plant a flower. A walk in the forest, a coffee with a friend.

When you're past your employment years and way past your parenting-of-a-young child years, you have time to unravel all those intricate and convoluted layers of life and you begin to understand that you actually have to fight to find, and then too, to preserve joy. 

Let's just stay with food for a bit longer. I wrote a lot about it yesterday -- how so much of what we enjoy turns out to be horrible for you and how much harm you're doing to yourself if you stick with your candy bars and UPFs, and win,e and, well, just about everything else that's not growing in your organic farmer's fields. I don't deny that this is all true. All that stuff lining grocery store shelves is to a degree harmful. But how much can we ignore the joy that at least some of it brings us? I was thinking of my mother, who spent most of her senior years as a type 2 diabetic. (She died this September at age 100.) And yet, each time I moved her -- to senior living, then to assisted living, then to another assisted living, and finally to the nursing care facility -- I'd find stashes and stashes of candy bars in her fridge, her suitcase, her closet. I would discard most of them, not because I wanted to deprive her of sweets, but because there was just too much. In her final move, she was no longer mobile and she could not make her way to the cupboard where I kept her candy bars. I would offer them to her when I came to see her, but she was not interested. Me, handing it over to her as a largess did not give her the same guilty pleasure as eating it on her own did, straight from her hoarded loot. You could say that she deteriorated because she was physically weak. I'd say she deteriorated rapidly because she no longer had any iota of joy in her life. And that included not being able to wheel herself over to the shop that sold those illicit candy bars, which she presumably ate on the sly.

Today, finally, I came across something in my readings that tried to balance out the avalanche of press on the harms all around us. It's an article in the NYTimes about wine (again, I'm gifting it for you so it's free; it actually appeared three days ago, but it is SO BURIED at the bottom that I missed it). I'm seeing in it something of what I feel about joy: a message that it's complicated and nuanced and you have to be studious, and smart, and certainly careful in how you look for it, but you cannot stop the search!  

Since I know most of you will not read the link (or listen to it, as it's a podcast), I pulled out a couple of sentences that I find especially strong (again, this is from a guy who studies and writes about wine, and it is in response to the Surgeon General's proposed cancer warnings on wines, beers and all other alcohol, but you could substitute it with any number of pleasures -- for example, my mother's candy bars):

I’m here to say that there is so much beauty and meaning in consuming a small amount of wine, that to have that bigfooted by threats and warnings, like the ones we’re seeing now that lack so much nuance, is really disappointing and frustrating because it’s going to drive so many people away from a truly magical experience. ...

In a life that risks becoming stripped of a certain kind of magic, because we’re trying to protect ourselves out of existence, I want you to think about what your glass of wine is and advocate for that and keep that alive in your lives, because that flame is precious. And there are certain things in our modern existence that really threaten it.

So yes, of course, we should have access to the science, we should care about harm (mom! those candies are not good for you! dad! you drank too much, to the embarrassment of your whole family!), but should we run scared into a dark forest and stick with foraging wild berries and nuts to keep us primed for a healthy tomorrow? You know, I read passages in a book about a French detective that describe his pause in the middle of an investigation for a swig of coffee and a bite into a fresh croissant. The world melts for him. He is made whole bu it. This, to me, is the other side. The world melts for me as well when I break off a croissant piece with my milky coffee. I feel his joy, just as I feel my own in the mornings when I go rogue and eat pastries.

I wish it were easier. I wish a glass of wine or a Negroni wouldn't disrupt my sleep, nor put me inline for cancer treatments, and I hope Ed never has a fatal bike or motorbike crash (over 1000 are killed in bike traffic accidents and more than 6000 in motorbike ones in the US each year), and I wish going to Paris would not leave such a carbon footprint, and that croissants weren't all about butter and white flour, with added sugars in jam. But as I said, joy is complicated and I think you have to unravel it for yourself and come to terms with what is good for your body and what is good for your soul, but do not, please do not leave out of it the discussion joy. Please. 

[To stick with wine, here's a proposed by me warning on wine bottles, but really anything else that you may want to ingest even as you are told it may be bad for you: wine, in addition to harming your fetus should you be pregnant, and killing innocent bystanders should you choose to drive after consuming it, may increase your chances of addiction, and it may increase your chances of disrupted sleep and slightly increase your chances of disease. Excessive drinking, as defined by your age, gender and physical characteristics will definitely harm you and everyone else within spittin' distance of your inebriated self, so don't do it! However, a reasonable amounts of it, with due consideration for your physical and mental health and your surroundings, may well increase your pleasure in life, raising your level of well being modestly, or even greatly, depending on how much care and wisdom your give to the act of its consumption.]

Overnight, there was a new dusting of snow. Nothing significant, but still, enough to have me take that half hour morning walk outside.

(the chickens stand on one foot at a time to keep those icy toes from freezing)

(Friendly, why are you in a tree? Running away from Pancake again? Okay, let me provide an escort back to the house...)

(we planted these trees when they were literally an inch tall)

A little around farmette lands, but mostly around the new development. Why there? Well, because I am so isolated from humanity that I actually welcome some signs of human life. I give gusty hellos to people brushing off the snow from the sidewalks.

I do test myself for Covid today and the upshot is that I detect, with all lights on and with my best magnifying glasses, the faintest possible "positive" line. This does mean that I am not 100% free of it and so I postponed tomorrow's birthday dinner yet again, moving it to Monday. I want not even a vague shadow of a line. I want certainty. Ed and I have kept to our isolation for so many days -- I'm not going to blow it now.

And it is because of the isolation and the absence of demands on my days that I'm playing this healthy game of daily movement, no matter what (even if it had to be in pacing the living room of the farmhouse for a few days), and of healthy breakfasts (I haven't had a croissant since... 2024!), and of boring lunches with seed bread and hummus. It's become a fun game -- to mind my habits during this prison sentence! I'll show them who's boss of my body!

Breakfast? Oatmeal based.

Ed visits in the afternoon once more. Still sleeping a lot, reading some, under a quilt, on the couch. It feels as quiet with him here as it is when he retreats to the shed. His is a much longer Covid and were it me, I'd be in the clinic by now checking things out, but Ed is not persuadable, at least not today, and so I watch him rest and hope tomorrow we'll see noticeable improvement.

 

Then dinner. Chili, because it will last for several days.

 

It surely is a weird start to the New Year for us, but I've had worse! And the house is warm, and I turn on the TV once more, still alone, so picking out stuff that would cause Ed to yawn. How about Escape to the Country on BritBox? I'll let you know tomorrow what I think of it.

with love...