“Crossing a bare common,” says Emerson, “in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the brink of fear.”
Glad to the brink of fear. So ecstatic you can hardly stand it. And from such an ordinary thing as a winter walk.
“Life is ecstasy,” says Emerson. Not euphoria–not that occasional feeling that overtakes us when some wonderful thing happens. No, ecstasy–a feeling that emerges from within, in response to the ordinary events of life.
Emerson lived no charmed life in which all was smooth going. On the contrary, his ecstasy came on the heels of terrible, terrible tragedy. The death of Ellen, his first wife, whom he adored, when he was only twenty-seven years old and they had been married only two years. And the death of his son, Waldo, at the age of five, which caused Emerson such grief as to cry out in a letter to his friend Margaret Fuller, “Shall I ever dare to love anything again?”
But Emerson did love again. He came to love all of life, until everything around him awakened in him a feeling of rapture. Doing nothing special, just going about his everyday affairs, he found his spirits spiraling into ecstasy.
Where do such rapturous feelings, such a sense of meaning, come from?
The cliche, “You are your own source of happiness,” is a truth to which we all doff our hats. One might equally say, you are your own meaning. For Emerson it became a lived experience.
“Our first mistake,” Emerson explains, “is the belief that the circumstance gives the joy which we give to the circumstance.” Do you catch what a reversal this is of the usual way humans think? We look to people, things, events to make us happy. What Emerson saw is that it isn’t circumstances that bring us joy. It’s we who bring joy to our circumstances. It is we who make our meaning.
Emerson quotes Henry David Thoreau: “Surely joy is the condition of life.” We may be largely, even completely, out of touch with it, but there is deep within all of us an unspeakable joy. Circumstances don’t create it, but circumstances, if we will allow them to, can awaken us to it. Even when everything goes wrong, our circumstances can lead us to an awareness of joy as our basic condition. This is what makes life meaningful.
Pulitzer Prize-winner Anna Quindlen reminisces about summers spent at the beach: “My fantasies of an endless summer always ended badly. I went to dances at the local firehouse, with a consuming need shining so brightly from my light eyes in my tanned face that only the boldest or blindest asked me to dance. Mostly I read and walked for miles at night along the beach, writing bad blank verse and searching endlessly for someone wonderful who would step out of the darkness and change my life. It never crossed my mind,” Quindlen says, “that that person could be me.”
Intellectually, I have known for years that no one could make me happy–that happiness can only come from within. But for a long time, knowing this meant nothing in terms of my everyday reality. Intellectually I told myself that happiness comes from within, but in practice I looked to people, things, circumstances to make me happy.
When someone really praises you, do you find yourself feeling a little uneasy? Do you experience a certain sheepishness, almost wishing they wouldn’t say such wonderful things about you?
For years I longed to be admired, thought well of, valued. I wanted to be loved. I thought this would give my life meaning. But let someone be admiring of me, tell me how highly they thought of me, really value me, truly love me . . . and I suddenly found myself thinking not of my wonderful qualities but of my flaws.
Isn’t that a strange reaction? Someone praises you, and what immediately comes to mind is a slew of arguments to prove you really aren’t that good after all. It’s as if there’s something wrong with feeling ecstatically good about yourself. You’re not allowed to feel that good. It isn’t modest, isn’t humble, isn’t how you’re supposed to feel.
Why did it make me downright uncomfortable to feel really good about myself when someone complimented me? Because although I talked about being my own source of happiness, I hadn’t ever actually done what Carl Jung advises: “Your vision will become clear only when you look into your heart… Who looks outside, dreams. Who looks inside, awakens.”
Meaning comes from within.