Happiness is Bite-Sized: Finding Joy in Simple Moments

Today I played Kate Rusby’s ‘Hourglass’ and was transported to years living in St. Andrews, Scotland at the close of the millennium. Those two years were seriously hard—not least because I was often ill. But the sad songs on that album ring gladness for me. A fiddle-pipe duet on ‘Annan Waters’ sends shivers, it’s so beautiful—even if the tune, like most English folk songs, is tragic, narrating the story of a woman who drowns, never again to see her love.

Discovering Rusby was a joy of that time, a period redeemed by hundreds of diminutive joys. Small joys being the most common form redemption takes. I remember the day I discovered the CD bin at St. Andrews library and came home with the likes of Rusby and Nancy Griffith—two of many new friends found within the dark, stony walls of that library. During weeks when I slogged through theology tomes or returned from walking my school-aged daughter home in the downy wet of North Sea winter, many days battling a low-grade depression, their tunes buoyed me, bringing a snippet of happiness.

Each day at noon I’d break from the dull work of a research PhD to run down the block for a sandwich. Boots Pharmacy made an egg salad with cress I was especially fond of. Some days I’d top it off with a treat from the gorgeous array at Fisher and Donaldson—rhubarb tarts; creme puffs; strawberry danishes. In the evenings, I found pleasure reading novels as my daughter played beside me, and I read The Brothers Karamazov then immediately returned to page one and started again. Sometimes on weekends, we trolled a tiny stretch of beach beside the castle ruins for sea glass and rounded bits of blue and white pottery I still have.