The Moments of Happiness

We had the experience but missed the meaning

A friend and I were talking last week about the moments in life you remember because they’re marked by the thought: ‘I’ve arrived’. Where you have arrived is at the beginning of what you think your life will be from now on.

Sadly, the reason that you remember them so clearly is because they’re often an anomaly. You may be sipping cocktails and smoking Gauloise at a zinc topped bar in Montmartre being achingly cool one day, but the next day you’ll be hoping you have enough credit on your Oyster card to get back to your flat share and that nobody has stolen your cheese while you were out.

That doesn’t diminish those moments. In fact, they can be all the sweeter for being fleeting, and often a bit bonkers. Some of them are better left behind but good to have experienced. Others are revelatory because they give us the knowledge of what is possible and the permission to make it happen again. They don’t have to be massive things.

My friend and I both agreed that we had a moment like that the first time we went to the cinema alone. I took myself to see the film Immortal Beloved starring Gary Oldman at the Phoenix Picturehouse in Oxford one Sunday afternoon in my early twenties. It’s an arthouse cinema and it had a bar, so I bought a glass of wine and watched my film. I remember thinking that this was the kind of person I had always wanted to be. This was the start of the life I had imagined for myself.

Of course it was and it wasn’t. One wine fuelled afternoon in the cinema did not make me the Queen of the Bohemians I liked to think I was. It turns out that the Queen of the Bohemians still had to get two buses to work on Monday morning and audio type hours of structural engineering reports about pumping stations. The Queen of the Bohemians still spent her lunch hour wandering around Habitat, touching everything she couldn’t afford and going home to a sofa so dreadfully uncomfortable it had been free in the local paper.

Despite all that, I wouldn’t have swapped that moment of arrival for anything in the world. It was beautiful. It made good on the promise of what I believed adulthood to be when I was a child. It made up for some of the desperate days of my teens. Moments like that are a gift.

I say are, because even now there are days when I find myself doing things I thought could never happen to someone like me. Before lockdown I went to see The Human League in concert. I was dancing, singing at the top of my lungs, sweaty and raucous, part of a huge crowd of people sharing a moment. Then, for a split second I found myself on the outside, looking in. I had a really clear memory of watching the band on Top of the Pops when I was a child, looking at the crowd of people dancing and thinking that would never be me. Now, all these years later, it was me. I had arrived in that moment and it was joyous.

There have been dozens of moments of arrival in my life. Some of them I have cultivated. Some of them I have given myself permission to extend. Others I have put aside. Sometimes the life I thought I wanted, turned out to be not all that. Sometimes I find that the moments I would have run a mile from in my twenties are things I run towards in my fifties.

The mistake I made in the early days was thinking that the first moment of arrival was the only one. I thought that you arrived at being a grown up and then you were. Only I never did manage the being a grown up bit for very long, not in the way I thought I was supposed to.

Have your moment, live your joy for as long as it makes you happy and then move on. Other moments will come, and they will all be as sweet as the first, if you let them.