What happens when you're paralyzed with happiness?
A perfectionist's thoughts on achieving bliss and what to do about it
The lilac trees have erupted again, pale and wincing, as if beauty, when concentrated too thickly in one place, were scared of seeming rude. A row of trees trembled slightly in the breeze, and under the viridescent canopy so ripe that it couldn’t contain its own fertility, rotting magnolia petals vanished into the crevices of the sidewalk. Everything was in bloom and nothing wild. The tulips clustered on stoops in bright opaque shades: open-wound-red, jubilant orange, egg-yolk yellow, bridal white. A boy holding a hockey stick stood on a lawn so green that it embarrassed the modest rose bushes, shifting his restlessness from hip to hip while waiting with the impatience of someone whose worries had been outsourced to their parents. Down the street, a woman in dark sunglasses bent to tie her shoes, then she rose, flicked her ponytail, and marched onward while her dachshund bounced along with the hiccuped stride of someone running late for work. Somewhere, a child blew bubbles, which floated through the dewy air, iridescent and carefree, like planets suddenly cut loose from their orbital mater.
Happiness feels like a lot of nothingness. It feels like no longer needing, like sitting in a room with no corners and no clocks and realizing you’ve arrived somewhere and there’s nowhere else to go, and to be at rest in the face of perfection is the hunger of everyone who is aiming at excellence, not because they want to stop moving but because they want to earn the right to, they want to one day sit inside something so complete that there is nothing left to say and still feel like themselves inside it, still feel useful even when all their usual tools—the ambition, the critique—have been laid down, and what is nothingness if not a form of perfection?
My heart has been stolen, my mind has been lost, my imagination has been handicapped because it can no longer produce images greater than what reality is already offering. At last, I am psychologically destitute. I have nothing more to metabolize into elegance or wit or revenge or poetry. I have no more ambition, and nothing else to do other than sit pretty in my good fortune like someone who woke up mid-surgery, aware that the anesthesia hasn’t worn off but the cutting is over, and everyone has miraculously disappeared, and I’ve been left on the table blinking into fluorescent stillness, numb—paralyzed, really—and it feels terrific.
When you’re paralyzed with happiness, there’s nothing to say, not because you’ve gone mute with awe but because the moment is too pure for language. Because everything you used to say was a way of moving yourself forward (toward something? Away from something? Around something?)and now there’s nowhere to go.
I am so happy that I feel like a hunter who has bagged the rare white stag of mythology and suddenly feels the great hush of the forest descend, permanent, irreversible, and what should be peace feels like the start of a dream with no arc, because if perfection exists and you are in it, if time has been recovered from the very beginning and laid its secrets bare and I have witnessed the birth of gods, then what, exactly, is left to do with the day?
