THE BEST KIND OF HAPPINESS

"The best kind of happiness is the happiness one creates for oneself, quite incidentally, out of the everyday materials and commonplace beauty of the world at hand."

(Anne Giardini, The Sad Truth About Happiness, Harpercollins, 2006 P12 of the P.S. Section)

Him: You sure are writing a lot of animal conversations lately.
Me: I know. I’m doing it for Tracey.
Him: Really?
Me: Yes. She likes them.
Him: I know she likes them. She always reads them out loud to me. But she doesn’t think you’d be writing them for her.

Of course she doesn’t think I’d be writing for her. She is, after all, the modest type. That’s one of the things I like about her. Another is her approach to happiness. Tracey has a happiness blog: LIFE, LOVE, HAPPINESS. There is absolutely nothing extraordinary about its content—absolutely nothing except for its focus. The name says it all.
I suppose there are some who would say that blogs like Tracey’s are disingenuous, even misleading. There are those who would criticise them for telling only half the truth, for leaving out the gritty details.
Gritty details definitely have their place. They are the stuff of interesting gossip. They help create narrative tension in the best of stories. But they also shape our emotional response to the world in which we live. When it comes to writing our own diaries, we tend to believe what we read.
The truth is a matter of selection. Of course there are gritty details in tracey’s life. But you won’t read them on her blog. You have to get to know her to know them. Tracey writes this blog for herself, to shape and record an important aspect of her emotional life that might get lost in the daily routine of coping and complaining. She could keep it private, but she makes it available to any of the rest of us who like to know about her life. In a world where upcoming newspeople are taught to shape our reading by the saying “If it bleeds, it leads”, blogs like Tracey’s help to tip the scales a bit. And every time I write an animal conversation, I think of happiness. I picture Tracey, smiling, and reading it out loud to Him.