Ordinary joys

When the body knows what's coming, even if you don't.

The Dog of Doom herself, showing us all what it means to spend a day well.

I don’t know if I can adequately sum up exactly how quietly, boringly, perfectly happy I’ve been this past week. I have had a week filled with bliss—and I’ve done absolutely nothing flashy or exciting or extraordinary to make this come about. I’ve spent large swathes of time inside because the weather has been cold and snowy one moment and then warm and slushy and freezing-rain-y the next. (Luckily, aside from one day where Sitka only got a morning walk and then jaunts out in the backyard because of ice, we’ve been able to get out for multiple daily walks, so the dog has remained happy, as have I.) I’ve slept as long as I’ve needed to and I’ve done some boring life-admin things (tax time! My favourite time of year!) and I’ve been reading and watching books and films about space. I’ve been researching. I’ve written a poem every day and while I have not actually done any honest-to-goodness writing on my new project, I’ve been thinking about it constantly. A few days ago a potential ending for that project slotted into place in a way that felt almost mystical, like I was living through my own version of The Queen’s Gambit.

I made vegan burrito bowls that were so delicious and made me so happy I’ve already gushed about them on my Substack Threads and in Notes. I had one—1—Zoom conversation with a friend I haven’t seen in a number of years. Yesterday morning I had another conversation on the phone with another friend and creative partner with whom I’m hopefully cooking up some exciting things in the not-so-distant future.

“I’ve talked to hardly anybody,” I raved to her over the phone, “and it’s been so fantastic!”

There we have it, friends. All Amanda needs to be happy, apparently, is food, domestic and creative tasks, and—crucially—the ability to be alone and silent for long stretches of time.

These feel like nice, solid, attainable happiness requirements. How I wish I had known all of this so much sooner! I could have saved myself so much angst and despair in my 30s if I’d just dialed down my happiness requests a little bit.

But then, of course, if I hadn’t had those years of despair in my 30s you could argue that I wouldn’t be where I am now. Perhaps even despair has its place if you’re able to look at it from enough distance away.

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I’ve been thinking a lot over these last few weeks about how we often marvel at the way that animals seem to know things. How squirrels know when to start eating more acorns and putting on weight in preparation for the winter months. How birds and butterflies can tell from the shifts in temperature and light that it’s time to start making their way south. How they know to navigate their way south in the first place. (Side note: Ed Yong’s wonderful book, An Immense World, is a beautiful exploration of this. Read it, if you can!) We often talk about this as though animals have some kind of mystical, amazing ability to sense time in the world even without clocks. How advanced, we think, on some level, in the condescending way we so often approach nature. Who would have thought animals could be capable of so much?

There’s a lot to be said here about how misguided this (Western, Eurocentric) approach is, and arguably how much we’ve been let down by the division of mind and body that’s had centre stage in the story of human development over the last five hundred years. How the overarching narrative of humans as existing on a higher plane than the rest of nature—of being dominant over nature, instead of an intricately linked part of it—has cut us off from so much.