(I feel like I've posted this before but I can't find it...so. It's a bit that didn't make it into the Do Interesting book. Though, clearly, it should have)
The Australian author Helen Garner wrote a magnificent essay for The Guardian about happiness. She said she’d finally realised that it wasn’t a thing you got after a lifetime of striving but something that you ‘glimpse in the corner of your eye’ Something elusive, that slips away before you name it.
And then she writes:
“So I’m not going to spend what’s left of my life hanging round waiting for it. I’m going to settle for small, random stabs of extreme interestingness – moments of intense awareness of the things I’m about to lose, and of gladness that they exist. Things that remind me of other things. Tiny scenes. Words that people choose, their accidentally biblical turns of phrase. Hand-lettered signs, quotes from books, offhand remarks that make me think of dead people, or of living ones I can no longer stand the sight of. I plan to keep writing them down, praising them, arranging them like stepping stones into the dark. Maybe they’ll lead me somewhere good before I shrivel up and blow away.”
And then she tells you about the things she’s noticed. It’s magical and mundane.