Oh goodness, it’s 9am, the day of a birthday—the eleven year old will be twelve around 4 this afternoon—and I just spent an entire hour I don’t really have reading this gloriously long, luminous, wonderful, perfect piece of writing. Do I regret it? No, and neither will you. Truly, if you just read it over and over again until you die, you will not have lived in vain. Feels almost criminal to ever write anything again when there is such writing on the internet.
I’m a fool, though, and an addict, so I can’t help myself. What I love about today is that Gwyneth Paltrow (GP) and Mark Zuckerberg both exist in such high and lofty life situations that the rest of us can read about them in the morning, scrolling in wonder and amazement over their concerns, their endeavors, their priorities and beliefs. It’s like I, the hobbled peasant, crouching near the cool stone column, the flying arch nearly taking flight above my head, reaching out a weathered and leprous hand in wonder as some exultant Lady makes her way over the smooth stone mosaic floor to her pew in the front. Her light delicate head dress flutters as she walks, her perfect skin shines in the filtered sacred light, her ivory hands clutch in prayerful piety a rich, luxurious book of prayer. She passes me by and I gasp in wonder.
That’s what it’s like reading that Mark Zuckerberg lost so much money in one night he has fallen below the 70 billion in personal wealth mark. I imagine him there, at his perfectly lit kitchen table, slumped over with his head in his hands, his wife trying to tell him it’s ok, he can still be human, he can try again tomorrow. So what if both the right and the left are mad at him, so what if four separate people I have talked to this week have chucked Facebook, it’s ok darling, you’re still a human person.
GP should give him a call and suggest some sort of wellness cleanse—something to center his body and mind in reality?…no, that doesn’t seem quite right. Wellness, whatever it even is, isn’t about being grounded in reality.
Right before I clicked on the glorious GP article I skimmed some stuff about how happiness studies are difficult, if not importable, because no one really knows what it is. That’s true. That’s more true than anything. Facebook and goop exist because none of us know what happiness is. If we knew, nobody would ever be able to make any money off us.
And by “we” today I mean everybody else. I know what happiness is. I don’t experience it very often. It is fleeting and elusive. It never settles over me in the way I want. I never can get a hold to of it. But I know it, personally, relationally even.
Happiness is knowing that no matter how hard I try, how much money I spend, how hard I work, what I achieve, how perfectly I control my mind, emotions, and circumstances, I am, in myself, such a sinner, so far gone from the way I ought to be, that I am part of the problem. The brokenness of the whole earth in some small way falls to my unwell, sickened heart. If I stayed there, of course, I would be more miserable than ever. But I don’t. Instead I look to a person who is well, who is perfect, who has the power to heal me of myself. I don’t have to spend any money on this. I can just pray and ask for help. And this person comes and takes me out of myself, relieves me of the endless, exhausting misery of constantly considering myself. Eventually I’ll die and all the sin will go away and I will be well. But until then I can always turn away from myself and my wellness to him and his goodness.
And now I must go bake a cake.
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