A New Year, a New Happiness

As my birthday approached a couple of years ago, a number of emotions surfaced as I faced the implications of my age. Where had the years gone? Why was my life nowhere close to how I imagined it would be by this age? Yet as I pondered the matter, I found that as I reflected back on what I had believed was the obscenely huge mess I had made of my life, I found I had learned much that made me appreciate where I was in life.

Now here I am on my 40th birthday revisiting those past ruminations. This past year I experienced some of the most awful moments of my life. At one point I was ready to leave this world firmly believing that act would make it a better place. Love and compassion from those I least expected to offer it, saved me from myself.

There are a few specific things which come to mind. For example, David and I have been watching a lot of Will & Grace re-runs over the past several years. We took to the series a while back when it was on in prime time. For myself, I felt it was a light-hearted portrayal of the modern gay man facing the day to day challenges anyone might face in life. At times it felt trite and stereotypical. But alas, when you surrender occasionally you find yourself enjoying the silly stuff, especially through the eyes of someone seeing it for the first time, getting the cultural references from your childhood, keying into how ground-breaking some of it was for its time. And how funny it is, for what it is.

I didn't have a lot of heavy stuff going on in my life during much of those Will & Grace years. I was sort of a step or two back from life at the time, busy in my own world. But now I find myself more engrossed by my life, my real life and all its facets, so maybe the quips and diva turns have more appeal as a distraction. Or a surprising provoker.

In one memorable episode (indeed one of our most favorite), Cher (in a blond wig) makes a funny turn as God in a dream sequence of Jack's. He is torn between his new lower management position at Barney's, and his "true path" of acting (which has never brought him any real success), and seeks her wisdom. After lots of funny banter, Cher dispatches Jack to consciousness with the admonition to "follow your bliss."

Indeed, Jack is drawn superficially in every way on that show, but there is a funny sort of moral to his cartoonery. He chooses the less financially smart, the less prestigious, the less rational path of returning to his disastrous acting career, thanks to the advice of his hallucination, which is really just a voice inside him telling him to choose to be happy.

And if there is ever a story about following your bliss, it's Julie & Julia. Watching Meryl Streep bring the unbridled hugeness of Julia Child's joy to life, and Amy Adams' touching window into the soul of every nervous, intelligent 30 year-old, was all sheer heaven. But it also brought a lot of reality home to me.

It seems that we rocket out of our college years with a false sense of how life is structured, and what our purpose in life must be, only to be devastated when we meet the real world outside in all its complexities, its vagueness, its moral neutrality and its seductive yet frightening ambiguity. This seems to have been the case for many generations of enlightened, educated men and women. They were told about certain roles that were fixed, and then they inevitably found out it was all a sham or another. Or they trotted out along a path that naively seemed absolutely certain, only to find that there is no such thing for a life as long as we end up having.

Then the anxiety sets in. And the depression. The lows, as it were. (This was Julie, the fervent but lost soul, seeking her own path to joyous living out of the pit of a depressing job and an uncertain future.)

We frantically scramble for a high, or if one crosses our path we latch onto it with both hands and try to ride it out like a runaway truck, just to pull away from those lows, maybe banish them altogether magically. We come to depend on those highs until they begin to run our lives, command us in many ways. Make us even turn away from the most important things we cherished, the values we held so proudly, the people who love us the most. The people we once were. When we look in the mirror, it shows.And before we know it, we're living a rollercoaster life of highs and lows that becomes so exhausting that every sort of heartbreak seems to follow us everywhere. Nothing lasts. Nothing can soothe the mind or the body. And we so want to go back to that naively structured world of college (or childhood home) because it seemed far more stable, more normal, more ordered.

And then, one day, you wake up. Something sort of snaps, or completes, or jolts you out of it.

For Julie, it was the end of her project, to make all of Julia Child's recipes in one year and blog about it. For most of us it is something that just sort of runs its course and reaches a conclusion. An epiphany of sorts. Something that just wakes us up to reality and shows us that life is not meant to be some enervating typhoon of unnecessary drama and self-indulgence. That it need not be anchored to a false set of rules, nor be needlessly blown apart and set in broken pieces onto the water.

Life just is what it is. And we're best to accept it, learn its natural rhythms. We're smarter to leave aside the manic highs of indulging all our fantasies and appetites without limits, at the expense of real joy, real satisfaction, real love, and real, lasting rewards. And we are happier being our real selves, rather than trying on a million different other selves which only serves to prolong our misery.

This is when we finally debut, I think. This is when the good stuff starts to happen for us, when great ideas are allowed to flower and be nourished. When our confidence is really fed and emboldened. Opportunities suddenly appear. So do people. New love can blossom and grow wild and resilient. Old regrets can be released, old debts forgiven. Bad habits finally put in their place. Childish things left in boxes. It is this time when we suddenly become our most beautiful, when our bodies seem to fall into place and we take our real shape. When our faces begin to glow, and our smiles seem borne of a deep satisfaction we didn't know before. Our eyes begin to move more fluidly, and linger meaningfully, and our touch is heavier with feeling. Sex becomes less about emotional release, and more about emotional joining -- less fantasy and more a celebration of reality.

And you know what? It happens again. And again. And again as we go on in life. Each time it happens (30....35...40…45?) it's both more gentle and more unexpected. (We get arrogant each time thinking, "this time I found myself for real," and each time we're humbled into seeing it's a never-ending process that just gets more wonderful with time.)

I mean -- Julia Child liked to eat. Then she decided to cook. She studied. She practiced incessantly, cooking as well as eating and always perfecting, simply for the joy it gave her to eat that perfection. Then she taught cooking. Then she edited the writing of others about it. Then she wrote about it. And then she ended up on television. It was no straight line, and every step was a totally loony idea at first. But that was her extraordinary, wandering path to joy, which began when she opened herself to all its possibilities and embraced life for what it really should be.

It is not about knowing the destination. It is a lifelong journey you merely travel. And it is one I have been on for a long, long time.

And so as I say “Happy 40th” to myself, I resolutely continue on this path of returning to school which I started almost three years ago, face the uncertainty of what I will do when I complete my degrees, and embrace the joy of experiencing life with my partner, our fur babies, and the dreams we share.