Bohemian rhapsody

I haven't been feeling very happy for, well, the last eight years or so. A friend once said that he wasn't aiming for happiness, but contentment. I can't help thinking that people who are content with contentment are afraid of committing to happiness. One is unlikely to soar high enough to melt one' s wings and go into an emotional freefall if one is drifting on the banal breeze of contentment. Yet at the meditation retreat I attended recently a few people seemed perturbed when the teacher talked about happiness and how we are all seeking it. “That sounds too much like rapture” one man said. I think he was implying that such a state would be the equivalent of a prolonged emotional orgasm that would eventually burn out your neurotransmitters and leave you a blathering idiot, proving Mark Twain right when he said that happiness and sanity are an impossible combination.

So I'm trying to identify what it is that I'm feeling this week. I'm off work, house- and dogsitting on Knowlton Lake. The place is wonderful: complete privacy, lakeside sauna, kayaks, fairytale tower out of which I could dangle my locks – if only they were longer – for a horny prince to take hold of, and surrounded by woods full of wild ginger, trilliums and white pines, whose needles sound the soft lament of spirits travelling on the wind. Lucy is wonderful too: an aging, deaf beagle who retains her keen sense of smell and joie de vivre and brings a teddy bear to bed each night. Lucy strikes me as happy, probably because she doesn't question everything she's feeling.

I feel like maybe I'm feeling happy here. I don't have to set an alarm clock. I can spend hours reading a book, watching the lake, listening to the loons. Marvel at the turkey vultures, so ugly and ungainly on the ground, then transformed by the alchemy of air into circling grace. There's no internet access, so I haven't checked my email or been online since I arrived. I'm not visually reminded of all the stuff that needs doing around my house--like getting someone to clean the eavestroughs, which have been accumulating gunk since I bought the place eight years ago. And I like being able to snoop. I don't go through drawers or look into medicine cabinets (honestly!), but I examine the knick-knacks, the artwork, the books, the CDs, the dishes, the gardens, the cobwebbed corners. Other people's lives are so much more interesting to me than my own life is.

In the two years before I bought my house I had what was the closest I'll probably ever get to a bohemian existence. I'm far too conventional to ever be a true bohemian. But for those two years I was a student with a portable life, moving from a cabin on a creek at the back of someone's property to various housesitting jobs to briefly living with an artist (who was more of an artiste in terms of temperment). I dwelled in possibility. Then I entered the regular working world and bought a house, committed myself to the straitjacket of a mortgage. I took on the dreadful burden of furniture. My bohemian rhapsody had ended.

It sounds like my house is preventing me from being happy, which probably isn't true. One of my best friends from high school, who is the only person I am still in touch with from that era, asked me if I was going to go to our 30th high school reunion this July. I said that if I were to go I would want to invent a life (and maybe that is why I like housesitting so much: it lets me do that in a way). I could tell she didn't approve of this plan, or probably it was more that she didn't approve of my dissatisfaction with my life. I know I sound like a whiny self-indulgent malcontent. Think of the starving kids in Africa. Maybe I should go on Dr. Phil and have him verbally beat my discontent or unhappiness or whatever it is out of me. Or maybe I should fashion a pair of wings and soar up, up into the wild blue yonder. If I get too close to the sun so be it. A fall is not always a failure. Sometimes, as someone wrote about Icarus' descent, it is a return from glory.