Observations On Perception

I had heard Nightbirde’s words before:  “You can’t wait until life isn’t hard anymore before you decide to be happy.”  Today they moved me with a force I could not remember from the first hearing.  Had I felt it then?  Would I feel it as strongly again?  I could answer neither question.  Yet I wanted to keep those words somewhere within reach. (parade.com⁠)

A sentence can remain in memory while the feeling it awakened becomes difficult to recover.  I can repeat the words, understand their meaning, and assent to them.  Whether they will sustain me when I need them is another matter.  The wish to preserve them arises partly from that uncertainty.  Something has reached me, and I would like to be able to return to it.

The remark brings happiness into the present, where so much remains unresolved.  If I make happiness depend upon relief from every difficulty, I entrust it to circumstances whose course I cannot determine.  There will always be reasons to wait.  Even the expectation of improvement can absorb the attention through which something pleasurable might become available now.

Yet the word “decide” gives me pause.  I know how little command a person may have over what can be felt.  Suffering can exhaust the very capacity through which pleasure is received.  A sentence that sustains me today cannot establish what I should have been able to feel yesterday, or what anyone else ought to feel under the weight of a different life.  Its force belongs to this encounter.

Perhaps that is why I hesitate to call what happened resilience.  The name suggests a capacity I might possess and call upon again.  What I experienced carries no such assurance.  I heard familiar words and felt a possibility become immediate.  I want that possibility to accompany me, including through moments when I may have difficulty recognizing it.

Writing this down preserves something of the encounter.  It records that the words reached me again, that familiarity had left room for an intensity I did not anticipate.  A later reading may disclose something quieter, or something I cannot foresee from here.  I would like to leave room for that as well.

Will I feel it as strongly next time?  I still do not know.  I hope the words will be there when I reach for them, and that I will remain able to receive whatever they may offer then.