No map required: How I found my happy place
Rounding the corner of my neighborhood park the other morning, I noticed a part of the landscape for the first time, though I’d walked the route for years.
An old oak tree extended a dozen big limbs to the ground, creating a curtain of green that set it apart from the rest of the park. Clever groundskeepers had planted a picnic table and benches within this impromptu alcove, making it seem like an outdoor room. The cool, deep shade and sense of privacy offered a perfect spot to read, talk, or do nothing at all.
I made a mental note of the scene – something to savor for the rest of the morning, or possibly the rest of my life. What I’d encountered, I told myself as I ambled home, was my new happy place.
Why We Wrote This
When it feels like the world has gone to pieces, we can find solace in our happy place. And, as our writer reminds us, these blissful escapes are more than dots on a map – they can become a state of mind, accessible anytime, anywhere.
I cherished the thought, though I avoided sharing it with anyone else. “Take me to my happy place” is such a common expression these days that it’s usually uttered with tongue planted firmly in cheek. We sigh a bit at the notion of happy places, which can sound like a trendy preoccupation, underlining our fashionable need to get away from it all. Given the anxieties of the news cycle right now, happy places – those tranquil little patches of paradise where we might retreat for a while – do seem especially inviting.
But the hunger for a happy place, which my dictionary defines as “a memory, situation, or activity that makes you feel happy,” is probably as old as our species. An obvious example rests within “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” Robert Frost’s famous 1923 poem about a traveler who pauses for a few moments beside a stretch of forest that’s “lovely, dark and deep.” The visitor wants to stay longer, but he’s nudged away by the prospect of “miles to go before I sleep.”
This homes in on the essence of happy places – that they draw us precisely because we can’t dwell within them indefinitely. Obligation – the odd errand, the office deadline, the pile of last week’s laundry – inevitably calls us elsewhere.
But E.B. White, another of my favorite writers, pointed to a consoling truth about the apparent fleetingness of happy places. Even when you can’t remain physically within a happy place, memory allows you to take it with you anywhere you go. Mr. White’s personal Eden was the Maine coast he enjoyed plying in his sailboats – a length of sea that shimmered in his daydreams.
“I have noticed that most men, when they enter a barber shop and must wait their turn, drop into a chair and pick up a magazine,” he wrote. “I simply sit down and pick up the thread of my sea wandering, which began more than fifty years ago and is not quite ended.”
What I like about Mr. White’s imaginary return to the frothy waves near his coastal farm is its stunning particularity. His fanciful visions affirmed a guiding ideal about happy places – namely, that they are, at their best, real places we have known.
Each time I open my office computer, it greets me with a rotating series of cheerful screen savers: a lovely German castle; an Italian villa; some craggy, misted shore in Scotland. They’re all indescribably beautiful, but I wouldn’t yet include them in my inventory of happy places.
To truly resonate, a happy place should be a landmark in one’s personal biography. I’m thinking now of a window seat in a Cotswolds coffee shop where my wife and I ate cake one day, watching British children file home from school as the shadows lengthened on an autumn afternoon. That happy place still warms my mood because I was part of it once – and hope to be again.
But even if life doesn’t bring me back to that little shop in rural England, that bit of bliss can come back to me. Happy places are more than dots on a map. They can become, in the wonder of remembrance, a geography of the heart.
