What is Your Happy Place?

My daughter and I are on her bed at the end of the day. I am laying diagonal across the bottom half of the bed, both legs bent into upside down V’s. My daughter is lying diagonally across the bed as well, but in the opposite direction, with her head on my stomach. From above, we make a capital T. She has a towel wrapped around her head after a bath, which is slowly soaking my shirt. We are covering the day's events, which were pretty awesome. We found a new rock climbing gym, and she climbed until her fingers were good and raw. Proud dad.

Then she hits me with a great quote. “Wendy’s is my happy place.” She hasn’t seen Happy Gilmore, unless you count the time when she was nine months old, crawling on the living room carpet while it played in the background. I must have said it sometime, or she just thought it up. Either way, the quote works perfectly. Then she asks me, “what is your happy place?”

Such a great question. An important question, really. If we don’t have a happy place, what are we actually doing with our lives? Where do we go in our heads when we need to find joy? Where are we aiming to arrive if not a happy place? What’s all this work and responsibility for if we can’t ultimately experience something so good that we forget everything else and simply be in that moment?

I hadn’t phrased it the same as my daughter, but I’ve actually been thinking a lot on the subject all year. I’ve been calling them “perfect moments.” But they are slightly different. Happy Gilmore’s happy place is purely mental - a little psychic space filled with everything that makes him happy. When he goes there, it quiets the madness, and helps him focus, mostly on playing his bombastic brand of golf. My daughter's happy place is a physical place she wants to go to because of the burgers and Frostys.

In sort of a mutant mash of both things, my perfect moments are the times in life that I live for, but often don’t fully appreciate unless I focus. Think about what you truly want out of life. Shelter, food, companionship, security. When you are able to achieve these, which is no small feat, what most people look for is a little recreation, laughter with friends, and time cherished with family. What’s silly about adulthood is that we get so busy doing the stuff that gives security of the basics, that when the best moments are here and now, our mind is stuck in the past or obsessed with future work to be done.

We long for the vacation, then sit and read emails on the beach. We dream of having a child so that we can watch it grow and play and fall into a pile of leaves in the fall. Then we get home from work and are tired and hungry and waddle around the house vaguely trying to relax while also doing chores to the point that we don’t engage with the child desiring all the things we dreamt of doing with them. Nothing is better than laughing with friends, but we get stuck being amused by videos of other people doing absolutely nothing of value, and decide to stay in rather than make the effort to go out, or call them over.

So this year I tried to just live in the moment. But more than presence, it was about a mental recognition of the things I truly want to experience in life. I want to watch my daughter, her cousins, and her friends grow up. I want to be silly with them. I want to actually watch whenever they demand I fix my attention on their dance/wiggle/song. I want to laugh with my friends, ask them deep questions, and really contemplate their answers. I want to work hard too. But in a way that allows for satisfied closure at the end of the day, not a worrying head. I want to sit on the couch with my wife, and remember that 20 years ago the only thing I wanted in life was to go home to the same house as her every day. I want to enjoy that not only I got it, but I still have it.

So when my daughter asked, “what is your happy place,” I said to her, “it’s right here with you, your damp hair on my stomach, with the climbing chalk still fresh on my clothes. And also Wendy’s, I love that spicy chicken sandwich.” I used to dream about these kinds of moments with her, and if I don’t recognize I’m in them when they happen, they will only exist as a memory.

What’s your happy place?