What If This Were Enough?: Essays

by Heather Havrilesky

Luxury means being able to relax and savor the moment, knowing that it doesn’t get any better than this. Feeling that way doesn’t require money. It doesn’t require the perfect scenery. All that’s required is an ability to survey a landscape that is disheveled, that is off-kilter, that is slightly unattractive or unsettling, and say to yourself: This is exactly how it should be. This requires a big shift in perspective: Since your thoughts and feelings can’t simply be turned off, you have to train your thoughts and feelings to experience imperfections as acceptable or preferable—even divine.

The future turned out to be just as incredible as I imagined it would be when I was little. But these days, I just want to slow down. I want to pull the shutters closed and block out the world. I want to spend hours gluing things together. I want to fill my house with tiny bits of collected junk. The more I have, the more I realize that all that matters is the small discoveries, the little interactions, the improvised, messy, glued-together moments that lie at the center of our happiness. Everything else is just a distraction.

Obviously, as an advice columnist, I’m often at risk of becoming part of the problem. I tell people to believe in the lives they really want, to set their expectations high and strive tirelessly to achieve their dreams. But I also want to say to them, time after time, that there is no “better version” of you waiting in the future. The best version of you is who you are right here, right now, in this fucked-up, impatient, imperfect, sublime moment. Shut out the noise and enjoy exactly who you are and what you have, right here, right now.

Dear sweet merciful lord, deliver me from these deliriously happy parents, frolicking in paradise, publishing books, competing in triathlons, crafting jewelry, speaking to at-risk youth, painting birdhouses, and raving about the new cardio ballet place that gives you an ass like a basketball. Keep me safe from these serene, positive-thinking hipster moms, with their fucking handmade recycled crafts and their mid-century-modern furniture and their glowing skin and their optimism and their happy-go-lucky posts about their family’s next trip to a delightful boutique hotel in Bali. I am physically incapable of being that effective or that effusive. I can’t knit and do yoga and smile at strangers and apply mascara every morning. These people remind me that I’ll never magically become the kind of person who shows up on time, looks fabulous, launches a multimillion-dollar business, and travels the world.

Individuals might have unseen talents and untold potential, but groups, under the sway of pernicious traditions and narcissistic leaders, inevitably become unruly, self-serving, and hostile.

Maybe that’s why the pastoral narrative requires such sharp teeth: If all lives include suffering, we’d like to suffer for valid reasons, and not because our supposedly ergonomic chairs make our backs ache, or the apps on our iPhones won’t load quickly enough.

Ultimately, though, it’s arrogant to imagine that going it alone is any nobler than collaborating, compromising, working within a community in order to improve it. We need each other to survive the catastrophes to come. But more importantly, we need each other to prevent them.

The years go by, and it gets less desperate. You get sick less often because you don’t wake up fifteen times a night. There’s less fecal matter to wipe up, and less grizzly-bear-mother rage at the ready. But now you’re getting older, so you say things like “Goddamn my ass hurts.” That is also romantic! It makes you both chuckle. You are both mortal and you’re both surviving, together, and you’re in this until the very end. You are both screwed, everything will be exactly this unexciting until one of you dies, and it’s the absolute greatest anyway.

You are not better than you are, though, and neither is your partner. That is romance. Laughing at how beaten down you sometimes are, in your tireless quest to survive, is romance. It’s sexy to feel less than totally sexy and still feel like you’re sexy to one person, no matter what.

Because at some point, let’s be honest, death supplies the suspense. How long can this glorious thing last? your eyes sometimes seem to ask each other. You, for one, really hope this lasts a whole hell of a lot longer. You savor the repetitive, deliciously mundane rhythms of survival, and you want to keep surviving. You want to muddle through the messiness of life together as long as you possibly can. That is the summit. Savor it. That is the very definition of romance.

In other words, at this late date in human history, it would behoove most of us to think less like gurus and more like artists—deeply connected to ourselves and each other, painfully, beautifully aware of reality, and exquisitely alive to the moment—in order to build a new world outside of the toxic illusions of this one.

Even natural wonders aren’t what they used to be, because nothing can be experienced without commentary. In the 1950s, we worried about how TV would affect our culture. Now our entire lives are a terrible talk show that we can’t turn off. It often feels like we’re struggling to find ourselves and each other in a crowded, noisy room. We are plagued, around the clock, by the shouting and confusion and fake intimacy of the global community, mid–nervous breakdown.

Living simply today takes work. It takes work to overcome the noise that has accumulated in our heads, growing louder and more pervasive since we were young. It takes work to overcome the illusion that we will arrive at some end point where we will be better—more successful, adored, satisfied, relaxed, rich. It takes hard work to say, “This is how I am,” in a calm voice, without anxiously addressing how you should be. It takes work to shift your focus from the smudges on the window to the view outside. It requires conscious effort not to waste your life swimming furiously against the tide, toward some imaginary future that will never make you happy anyway.

We have to cultivate compassion for ourselves and each other. We have to connect with each other in genuine and meaningful ways. But we also have to relearn how to breathe in the late summer air and feel the sunshine, to admire the swelling pink clouds and shut out the hiss of truck brakes, to sit on the ground and look up at the trees without looking ahead to what we’ll post on Facebook about it. You can have your eclipse and I will have mine. You can call yours a miracle and I will call mine a certain slant of light, like the one Emily Dickinson described: heavenly and oppressive and fleeting.

We must reconnect with what it means to be human: fragile, intensely fallible, and constantly humbled. We must believe in and embrace the conflicted nature of humankind. That means that even as we stop trying to live our imaginary, glorious “best lives,” we still have the audacity to believe in our own brilliance and talent and vision—even if that sometimes sounds grandiose, delusional, or unjust. We have to embrace what we already have and be who we already are, but we also have to honor the intensity and romance and longing that batter around inside of our heads and our hearts. We have to honor the richness of our inner lives and the inherent values that are embedded there.