Happiness for Beginners

by Katherine Center

“Told ya,” he said. “I’ve wanted to do this since the first second I saw you, by the way. All I wanted was to walk up to you and do exactly this.”

He went on, “I just wanted you. Every time I saw you, or heard about you, or saw your photo in Duncan’s room.” “And now that you’ve got me here, how does it feel?” “Too good to be true,” he said. A second later he added, “And it’s pure agony.”

He looked at me like he was memorizing every tiny detail—the way, I imagined, a painter must look at a subject.

“Helen. Helen—” he said. “Don’t. I really did trick you. There was no way you were going to win that Scrabble game. I was on a team. I played in tournaments.” “Should I mock you about that now or later?”

I’d expected crunchy-granola hippies. And nature freaks. Shoppers at Whole Foods. Readers of Outside magazine. Hemp enthusiasts. Athletes. Perhaps a poet or two.

Something about those blank looks pushed me forward and made me want to force them to get it, even though, of course, that just goes against the physics of human life: People can’t understand things before they can understand them.

What the hell had I been thinking? I wasn’t a hiker! I wasn’t outdoorsy! My favorite things in the world were soft beds, good books, and big cups of coffee. I did not want to have my ass kicked—by Mother Nature or anyone else.

And even though I knew the jokes were, in fact, jokes, I had somehow come away with a bizarre affection for Chuck Norris—and, also, for the idea of toughness in general.

“If at first you don’t succeed, you’re not Chuck Norris.”

She shook her head. “People are always their own favorite topics,” she said. “It’s the only thing they’re experts on.”

“Well, for example, happy people are more likely to register joy than unhappy people. So if you take two people who have experienced a day of, say, fifty percent good things and fifty percent bad things, an unhappy person would remember more of the bad.”

“The things you think about determine the things you think about”—meaning the more you focus on something, the more likely your brain is to focus on it.

“All-knowing Mother,” he said, with his head bowed. “I’m sorry human beings are such a blight. I’m sorry we litter your earth and choke the fish in your oceans with plastic grocery sacks. We have been given incomprehensible beauty on this earth, but we don’t see it. We walk around angry and blind and ungrateful. I wish we were better, our dumb human race, but I don’t have much hope that we ever will be. The best I can do today is say: Thank you for this world of miracles. We will try to be more grateful. And less ridiculous.”

Plus, I liked the idea of disappearing into the night like some party-motivating superhero.

“Or,” I went on, “it might have been when you spelled the word ‘lascivious.’ Or when you forgot to dry off your collarbone and just left all those droplets of water. Or when you fell during the bear hang.” “These are the things that work with women?”

the way you do the right, brave, kind-hearted thing in every situation, no matter what. Or maybe it’s just the way that I always, invariably, feel happier when I’m near you.”

They happened. They mattered. They left their marks. But the things we remember are what we hold on to, and what we hold on to becomes the story of our lives. We only get one story. And I am determined to make mine a good one.