“A happiness that spreads” – 32nd birthday reflections

A few weeks ago, during a ferry ride in Brazil, I met a woman from Norway who told me she was on her last days of her year-long trip around the world. When I heard this, I lit up immediately, and told her I had done a similar trip eight years ago. 

“That was probably the best year of my life,” I told her, which of course, I regretted instantly after saying it. 

“Noooooo don’t say that, that’s what everyone keeps saying!” She groaned. “I’m so worried now that I’ve peaked.”

I tried to backtrack, but I stumbled upon my own words, trying to explain what I had meant. 

What had I meant? What did I mean by “the best year of my life”? How could I reassure her that no, she hadn’t peaked, that some parts of my life now are in fact immensely better than they were back then, that the “better” these days just feels different? 

When I took a year off to travel across seven countries, every week was a big, transformative experience. It was a year of dramatic beauty and unpredictable adventure and sacred moments of total freedom; a constant stream of new places and new experiences and new feelings to absorb. 

And these years since? Admittedly, happiness these days doesn’t necessarily come with the same rush I had always loved from that year — that kind of post-adventure energy that radiates throughout your whole body and makes you feel like you can nearly levitate. These days, that kind of energy is harder to find. The more you travel, the more nothing feels like novelty. And overtime, the quick highs of travel don’t quite cut it anymore.

Nine months into my year of travel, after starting the trip on a “Carpe Diem” rage, by the end of it, I remember the day the man I traveled with looked over at me and said  “You know, you actually can’t carpe diem every day. You’ll just get fucking exhausted.” 

Happiness has then felt forced to change. And yet, at the same time, the years since haven’t necessarily felt like the sad downfall after a peak. Instead, peak happiness seems to have morphed into something that feels incomparable to my year of travel — not like a sad valley, and not like another peak either. Instead, it feels closest to that quote from Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts where she describes the time she has spent with her son: 

“My time with him has been the happiest time of my life. Its happiness has been of a more palpable and undeniable and unmitigated quality than any I’ve ever known. For it isn’t just moments of happiness, which is all I thought we got. It’s a happiness that spreads.”

In this last year, I’ve experienced more of a happiness that spreads. It’s a happiness that feels like my heart resting on a pillow, instead of my heart pumping out of my chest. It’s a happiness built with small but intentional and intimate interactions and decisions that have created the cushion I can now rest and rely on every day. 

It’s watching golden hour unfold on the redwood tree outside my partner’s window, as we drink beers and put together the IKEA dresser for his new house. It’s my roommate bringing home free almond croissants from the cafe where she works, or a friend taking me hiking, at exactly the moment I needed the boost. It’s dancing at a queer wedding by the ocean the night after coming out, with the queer friend who supported me along the whole way. It’s spending the night by a lake — after working a very white, elitist environmentalist conference — with the Latinx friends you’ve met through this work, and storytelling under the stars. It’s gentle foggy mornings in my house with a playlist that matches the weather, a cup of our house’s bulk Kirkland coffee, and a candle that makes my room smell like a forest. It’s receiving letters from readers of this blog.

Unlike the spontaneous, rapid-fire adventures of my year traveling, this kind of happiness had to be built over time. It is slower to achieve, but satisfying in a totally different way. Unlike moments from travel that excite and instantly transform, this kind of happiness reassures and nurtures; instead of showing me something new, it reconnects me with what I’ve always known.

Instead of the hard-earned, triumphant ecstasy of reaching the top of a steep mountain, happiness now sometimes feels like a leisurely walk down a beautiful, mostly flat trail. And though I still find myself often (maybe by habit) craving the volatility, I am learning what can also be created in steadiness. As my friend Courtney Martin wrote once “Sometimes it’s more interesting to build something and create intimacy than just to set your head on fire.”

Admittedly, I still don’t trust this feeling. Sometimes it still doesn’t feel big enough. Sometimes it feels too similar to complacency or idleness, and the resemblance scares me into thinking I must search for more. A part of me still resents that life can’t always be like my year of traveling. A part of me still feels more comfortable living that way.

But other times, I wonder if maybe I’m not giving happiness that spreads enough credit, not noticing its very real influence, simply because it shows itself less dramatically, gradually seeping into my days without much fanfare but still somehow palpable in its own way. What I know: a few evenings ago, I walked down Broadway street at sunset, the bare silver trees crawling up towards a pale blue and pink sky, the cars rushing past, the bars slowly filling, the plazas decorated with protest posters of a hopeful cause we may never solve, and I felt a softness in my chest that may be the closest I have felt to peace. And I realized that after the year I spent traveling, what filled the gaps between romantic moments in jungles and mountains and foreign cities was never as soothing as the almost-close-to-peace feeling that has now become steady in my body every day.

When I think now about that conversation with the traveling woman from Norway, I wonder if maybe I said my year traveling was the best year of my life simply because it was a year I was fiercely devoted to searching for bests — a year I invested deeply in superlatives. Maybe I would tell that woman now that happiness also exists outside of superlatives, and that kind of happiness can also feel enveloping. I search for it to take over my body in a different way — gently, in a way that lasts.
 

This is not to say that peak experiences have disappeared entirely. Sometimes, nothing feels more restorative than dancing half-naked in the desert to an electronic beat that seems to sync with my chest. Sometimes I genuinely feel more rejuvenated by a night out karaoking until sunrise in a foreign city than anything else. Sometimes a mountain view is so mesmerizing, my jaw still literally drops.

Sometimes, it is still like this. But at 24, when I took off a year to travel, like Maggie Nelson, I thought those moments were all we got. Perhaps this is what actually has made each year since better and better: now I know better. Slowly, I’m learning there might be more.