Today: The Happy Place

Way back during our Austin days, Rachael and I took a journey to the Gulf Coast. We camped on Mustang Island with some friends. In spite of infernal heat, a woeful lack of basic camping gear, and an incessant wind that scoured our car, our kids, and our faces with fine beach sand, we thoroughly enjoyed ourselves. For one, we learned something invaluable about Rachael.

We learned that she has what we have come to refer to as a “happy place.” Which I take to mean, a place where she feels so completely carefree as to cause her to momentarily drop the baggage of life at the door and enjoy herself . . . for a while. As luck would have it, this illusive “happy place” is far more ubiquitous that you might think. All she needs is a little sand, some water, and copious amounts of sun. Put all those things together, add kids and a camera, and Rachael can live off the happy memories for a year.

After years and years of routine, it finally dawned on me yesterday that I’ve been seeking a “happy place” all my own, every Saturday. Unlike with Rachael, however, my “happy place” has more to do with the Greeks than with venue. As I understand it, the Greeks would craft their plays to carry the audience through the gamut of emotions: pain, fear, humor, and so on.

The thought, I suppose, was that by the time you made it through all those “feelings,” you would have given vent to whatever emotional baggage you carried with you. And that was something to be desired.  Anyway, Rachael—our local authority on the Greeks—would know far better than I, but as I remember it, Aristotle referred to this cleansing, purgation, or venting of the emotions as “carthasis.”

So Greeks and beaches, right? Well, turns out that my “happy place” is more a state of mind, a cathartic state if you will, a place that I only reach after having experienced the cleansing purifying emotions dredged up during a day of “hard labor” in the sun and wind. But how exactly does one capture “hard labor” and all its attendant “passions”?

This picture captures it all. You will find my happy place behind a clean, organized garage on a Saturday afternoon, with the smell of fresh-cut grass in the background. Kids voices rise and fall from the backyard. And as I stand there, by this point very thirsty and on the verge of a whopping headache, the setting sun glints off our clean, freshly waxed cars.

Now, throw in the girl of my dreams and a smiling babe, and life is looking pretty good.