Let the Good Times Roll
And actually, the word “happiness” translates as bonheur in French, which literally means a “good hour” or “good time.” It’s something you experience. You can’t own a dance. You can’t bottle a man and take him home with you and then take him out of the bottle when you need a good laugh and a pick-me-up. Inherent in the French concept of happiness is the knowledge that time is limited and joy is fleeting. It’s a moment, never to be repeated. Dancing captures this feeling beautifully, because it involves all the senses—touch, sound, sight, smell, and even taste if the dance leads to a stolen kiss.
Dance can lift your mood and, yes, change your life. It’s a fleeting joy, but honestly, the experience of dancing to good music is so much more powerful and lasting than something you might buy in a store and bring home with you.
Babette’s Feast
When I asked Sylvie Gourlet, the artist and documentary filmmaker who lives in Paris, what she thought joie de vivre meant, she told me to rent the Danish film Babette’s Feast. “This is a true example of joie de vivre.” Without giving away too much, I will tell you this—the film’s climactic moment evolves around the most lavish dinner party imaginable. Babette sacrifices everything to give this gift—this experience—of the most sensual, delicious, life-changing fête. No detail is spared when it comes to the preparation, the serving, and the partaking of the astoundingly sensual and delicious meal. And while the diners try to resist, ultimately they are transformed by the beauty, the generosity, and the unforgettable pleasure of Babette’s feast. There is even a spiritual undertone to the film, as if to say good food, company, joie de vivre will save you. And I loved the message that if you are an artist, you will never be poor. And certainly Babette is une véritable artiste de la cuisine!
The next time you are tempted to microwave your dinner and eat all by yourself in front of the television, think about Babette. It’s true, we lead busy lives and it’s not always possible to create a sit-down dinner for one’s entire family, but if you can plan a group dinner, even once a week, you’ll see your life change.
And even when Frenchwomen microwave a dinner (yes, they do occasionally), they will take it out of the plastic container, put it on a nice plate, serve a salad beside it, and sit down at the dinner table with their family. Oh, and they’ll really have a conversation. One conversation builds on another and another and before you know it, you are truly connected to your family and friends. And that’s because there really is something to this idea of “breaking bread together.”
My Red Leaf Lettuce Epiphany
I will make a confession. I tend to get a little panicky when I go to the supermarket. Perhaps it’s the enormity of the place, or the people with the big shopping carts, the glaring lights, the hypnotic music telling me to buy, buy, buy! Then again, perhaps it’s all the signs shouting at me that paper towels are on special, or to buy two for the price of one. It may be the overwhelming plentitude of choices: fifty different kinds of breakfast cereals and ten different brands of yogurt, each one with five different flavors.
When I was thirty-two, my husband and two-year-old daughter and I moved from New York City to Huntington Beach, California. Eventually, I would end up going to UCLA for a graduate school program in screenwriting, but I didn’t know this at the time. At the time, I convinced my husband and myself that we would be happy if we just got out of the big city and raised our daughter in the country, by the sea.
Little did I know that we would end up in a land of unlimited choices: Orange County, California. Many people have suggested that unhappiness is not caused so much by lack, but by having so many choices it’s impossible to focus in on what we really want and what we need. Because of this inability to focus, we get confused and we are no longer able to see clearly who we are and what we are supposed to be doing in this world. Hence, too many choices in yogurt will send me into an existential crisis.
And this brings me back to Huntington Beach, California. One day, I walked into the Pavilions—a gigantic supermarket. I walked up and down the aisles, my heart thumping, full of confusion. My face flushed, as I struggled with this overwhelming feeling that I could never be good enough, smart enough. I worried about my little daughter, my marriage, my writing career, and I wondered what the heck I was doing in this life. Here I was in the land of sunshine, and there was so much wealth around me, and everyone was saying how lucky I was to live in Huntington Beach, but the truth was we were kind of broke and I missed New York City and I feared I had made a terrible mistake. I missed the gritty streets, the small markets in Astoria, Queens (we had moved there from Greenwich Village for the last year before coming west). I missed working for Estée Lauder in the GM Building and coming home every night on the RR train and picking up the ingredients for dinner at the fish store, the green grocery, the little bakery. I had my own little French village in this mostly Greek and Italian neighborhood. But there was no grass or trees and no fresh air for my daughter, and the winters were miserable.
And so I found myself in Huntington Beach, a place that was so foreign to me, I might as well have been on Mars. And now I was in the supermarket faced with a plethora of choices, in a state of frenzy. I walked quickly, trying to figure out what it was I was supposed to buy in the first place. Then I remembered how my Weight Watchers leader told us to “walk the circumference of the supermarket,” meaning avoid the aisles in the middle that held the most dangerous foods: the processed foods, the foods full of sugary and fatty goodness. She told us to stick to the outside—the dairy, meat, fish, and produce aisles. So I did.
And this is where I had my life-altering experience—what I like to call my Red Leaf Lettuce Epiphany. It was 1986 and I honestly had never seen red leaf lettuce before. I knew about iceberg lettuce, romaine, and butter lettuce (which my grandparents grew in Connecticut). But here in the Huntington Beach Pavilions produce aisle, there must have been twenty different kinds of lettuce. And they all looked so beautiful, so green, so vibrant and fat, arranged in such a way that they seemed to be bursting out of their displays and begging me to buy them. All of them! And I stood there, paralyzed. I couldn’t decide. There were so many choices. And then, the automatic sprinkler system switched on and sprayed all the vegetables, drenching the lettuce in water. This was also something I had never seen before, so I just stared. After a minute, I found myself focusing on the bunches of red leaf lettuce. They were so pretty—the reddish-green leaves, and they made me think of a ruffled cancan girl’s skirt bordered in ruby red and the sparkling dew from the supermarket produce water seemed like sequins sewn on a dress.
It was in this moment that I found illumination. Staring at the droplets of water on the leaves, I confess, I felt pure, unadulterated happiness. Those bunches of red leaf lettuce were so beautiful and so simple and, honestly, right there in the Huntington Beach supermarket, I began to cry. I cried big, fat tears of joy. And as corny as this may sound, I felt I learned something so valuable—and that was that I don’t need a big cartful of stuff to make me happy. I don’t need things in order to calm my nerves. Rather, happiness comes from slowing down and looking. Really looking. Happiness is not “out there.” It’s right in front of you. If you look, happiness is right there among the bunches of red leaf lettuce.
The Mysteries of Time
My French tutor, Marceline, grew up in Grenoble, France, during World War II. During a recent meeting, she told me how one of the first things she learned about America in her English class was the saying “time is money.” This expression says so much about our culture. If time is money, then when we do something that does not involve getting paid, is it a waste of time? A waste of money? If this is true, then I suppose my Red Leaf Lettuce Epiphany was not worth much and, in fact, in this equation, the time I spent standing in the produce department actually cost me money. If time is money, then I suppose dinner parties and dancing and laughing with your friends is a waste of money. Playing with your children is nonproductive. Making love . . . well, you see where I’m going with this.
These things take little time and cost no money, or very little money, and are the things that bring us joy.
So