Self Inflicted Joy

Reader beware: in the interests of accurate reporting, this post contains strong language.

The first real snowfall of winter came yesterday: a three-inch deposit of fat, soggy flakes that turned my street into a Norman Rockwell Christmas card.

We Canadians, at least those of us who don’t live around Vancouver, have to cope with a great deal of winter. As a result, we tend to classify things like snow and ice. When I was a kid, I would have described the white blanket covering my lawn as snowman snow. Yesterday, as I trudged to the back shed for the snow shovel, I thought of it as heart-attack snow. Pace yourself, Bren, I told myself as I inserted the edge of the shovel into the blank white expanse where the front walk used to be. Beneath the snow, lurked a thin treacherous layer of hip-breaking ice. Be careful, Bren, I told myself and added rock salt to my mental shopping list. This turned out to be a mistake, but that’s further on in the story.

Since reading Buddha’s biography, I’ve been thinking about the philosophy of the middle way. Not as a path to enlightenment, I have no ambitions in that arena, but as way of coping with life in general. Snow shoveling, for example, has always seemed like a cold, thankless chore, one to be pushed through as quickly as possible. Yesterday, unwilling to push too quickly and risk cardiac arrest, I tried an experiment. Every time I stopped shoveling, I tucked my hands into the sleeves of my ski jacket and looked around for something to appreciate about the situation.

Shovel, shovel, tuck. The snow on the crabapple tree looks pretty.

Shovel, shovel, tuck. Great. The snowplows are out.

Shovel, shovel, tuck. Are those deer tracks on the front lawn? Cool.

Shovel, shovel, tuck.  I love the smell of snow. It’s so clean and empty.

Shovel, shovel, tuck. Why is that bird hanging upside down? Oh. It’s a chickadee.

Shovel, shov… Hey! I’m done!

The experiment worked so well, I continued it during the day.

It was a slow morning at the library. I get sleepy when I’m bored and rely on a quart of kick-your-butt coffee from the library café to maintain consciousness. Yesterday, the café was closed. I felt pretty grumpy and hard-done-by until Barb came around taking orders for a coffee run to the McDonalds two blocks up the street. To break the monotony, I bundled up and joined her in what turned out to be a coffee slip-and-slide, since the downtown sidewalks were coated in more of that hip-breaking ice. We came back, distributed cooling paper cups of coffee to the other library employees, and I spent the rest of my shift in the warm, caffeinated glow of their appreciation.

I got off at one and went food shopping because I had a hankering for corn fritters, which require corn. Entering a supermarket with an empty stomach is never a good idea, and especially not when Christmas goodies are on sale at fifty percent off. I finished shopping and slip-slid to the bus stop with forty pounds of groceries pulling my shoulders out of their sockets, wishing that my mittens weren’t in the pockets of my other coat and that I had remembered put on an extra pair of socks.

When I arrived at the bus stop, I stood in line behind an attractive young woman and listened to her converse with someone on her cell phone. (It’s not eavesdropping when the person standing three feet away from you is practically shouting.)

 “I mean, you’re all like ‘I love you,’ and ‘I want you to have my babies,’ but when you see Amanda’s profile picture on Facebook, you’re like, ‘Wow, your friend is hot.’ Like how am I supposed to take that?” On the other end of the phone, her boyfriend must have dug himself a deeper hole, because she replied, “You’re an asshole, you know that?” and snapped the phone shut.

Now there were two things I really liked about this slice-of-life conversation:

1)   It wasn’t me having it. I’ve had my share of conversations like that one, the forks in the road of every romantic journey, when the myth of being the one-and-only crosses the grass-is-greener attraction of unconquered territory. One of the many advantages of reduced estrogen levels is that I no longer feel the need to be a one-and-only. Which is just as well, given the esthetic side-effects of estrogen deficiency.

2)   It made me forget about my shoulders, fingers and toes.

The bus came. I climbed aboard, gratefully slung my shopping bags onto the seat beside me, and blocked out the discomfort of returning circulation by listening to the young woman, who sat behind me and called a girlfriend to discuss whether or not she should dump the asshole. When the bus pulled up at my street, I slipped-and-slid to my front walk, where I realized that in my frenzied need to acquire corn and cookies and liverwurst and fruitcake and eggnog, I’d forgotten about the rock salt.  

An image of myself—lying on my front walk, pelvis shattered, writhing in agony—rose up in my mind. You should have written it down, Bren, I castigated myself. You can’t rely on your memory any more. Then it occurred to me, I’d been slipping and sliding around town all day without giving a moment’s consideration to the integrity of my pelvic bones. Now was not the time to start. Giggling, I slipped-and-slid the last twenty feet to my front door.

By any realistic assessment, most of what actually happened to me yesterday would fall under the headings of inconvenient, annoying or uncomfortable. Yet that evening, when I poured a shot of whiskey into my eggnog, sank into my easy chair, and picked up my knitting, I felt really, really happy. I can’t be sure about this, but I think it’s because I made an effort to notice good stuff, and there was enough of it to balance out the crappy stuff.  

So here’s what I’m wondering. If suffering can be self-inflicted, why not joy?