Fairy Godmother
“Sometimes I look back and think my whole adult life has been underlined with a feeling of waiting --- waiting for something to happen, waiting for circumstances to change, waiting for the right man or the right job or the right shoes-and-clothes-and-haircut to swoop down from above and change me, to infuse me from the outside in with a feeling of well-being and validation and peace of mind.” Caroline Knapp as quoted by Gretchen Rubin.
“Beware of destination addiction --- a preoccupation with the idea that happiness is in the next place, the next job and with the next partner. Until you give up the idea that happiness is somewhere else, it will never be where you are. “ Robert Holden, PhD
How many of us sitting “in our own little corner in our own little world” have languished in limbo waiting for our Fairy Godmother to arrive and wave her wand over our lives? We feel as is everything is on hold until some particular magical event occurs. We toil and endure and hope, but happiness is somewhere else. We are not experiencing happiness, or even contentment in our present. Joy seems elusive---something that might come about only if the sun and moon and stars all become aligned in a special, mystical way. Like Cinderella, many of us have been mistreated and overlooked. Add to that a pandemic quarantine that seems endless. We see no way out of our circumstances. The best we can do is muster up a smidgen of hope that some day, some way, things might be different.
And hope is good. It is necessary to maintain our dreams and positivity and goals. But, as stated by Dr. Holden above, happiness will never be with you if you insist on believing that only perfect circumstances that come to pass at some point in the future are necessary to bring it about.
In the book Do Not Go Gentle. Go to Paris, author Gail Schilling recalls a friend (Carol) that cherishes the concept of The Perfect Moment. It is naïve to think that we will go through life with unending blue skies, so the Perfect Moment practitioner will train herself to be on the lookout for moments in life that deserve to be consciously savored and carefully archived into the Perfect Moment file of our brain’s RAM. When life gets tedious, one only needs to retrieve the file in order to receive confirmation that happiness happens, even in times we least expect. Much happiness happens in everyday moments, not necessarily in elaborately curated planning.
Can you think of a moment when you had lunch with a good friend and everything was right with the world for one hour: great food, lovely ambiance, fun conversation? You probably had a Perfect Moment. What about that Saturday morning when the kids tried to help make pancakes and there was excess flour and sticky syrup everywhere in the kitchen but you didn’t care because of the way their eyes lit up and the laughter made everything beautiful? A Perfect Moment. How about the time when your carefully-planned horse-carriage-around-the-lake date got rained out, but you ended up in a cozy little French restaurant eating Crème Brulee, gazing into each other’s eyes, not even noticing the soggy clothes and bedraggled hairdo of your beloved? Life was Perfect at that moment, notwithstanding the undoing of your meticulous plans.
Like Caroline as quoted above, I frequently find myself disquieted and wasting time wishing for happiness to descend upon me. I exhaust myself fretting about what I need to do to bring it about. Yet many (most) times, I’ve come to realize --- all my fretting and planning and machinations fail to bring about what it is that I think I want. That lack of success results in feelings of failure or resentment that are certainly not needed.
So. I submit that we should quit wasting time fretting about how to manufacture happiness or waiting for some arcane confluence of circumstances. We should convert our efforts into zeroing in on life’s little moments of Perfectness. Like trained police dogs, we should move through our daily lives alert for those areas where a whiff of Perfectness will whip our snoots around to a location where our target exists. Savor that moment, snap the Polaroid of your mind and file that Perfect Moment away for future reference.
No need to await a Fairy Godmother (although the ball gown, glass slippers, and dancing with the prince could be a Perfect Moment). Start your training right now. Endeavor to be alert to prospective Perfect Moments. Fortify yourself by reviewing past Perfect Moments when you need a burst of happiness. Happiness will exist where you are at that moment. Right here in the present. Now.
I leave you with this example of one of my Perfect Moments from over 50 years ago. In 1965 I was blessed to view Rogers and Hammerstein’s version of Cinderella. Just turned 6 years old, I was smitten with the prince, and the shoes/ ball gown/ chariot conjured by the Fairy Godmother. To promote the show, our local department store sponsored a contest. Prizes could be won by the girl whose foot fit a magical glass slipper… a slipper to be provided by a handsome prince on bended knee. I was certain that the shoe, the prince, and the prizes would be mine. Even though it was clear to my parents that the promotion was designed for teen-agers and young women, my dad humored me and woke me up early one day to travel to the 4-story downtown store. (There were escalators!!) We stood in line for what seemed like hours ---my dad holding my hand, the two of us surrounded by merry teen girls and young ladies. As I got a glimpse of the handsome prince on his knee, I quivered with excitement. My turn came. I timidly extended my lace edge ankle sock- clad foot, and the prince gently slid the glass slipper onto my foot. Alas, the glass slipper was entirely too large for me… but I had had my moment as a princess. Years later I considered the love my policemen dad had shown by taking me to the prince ---even though he knew that there was no chance I’d win, and even though he’d probably had no sleep because he worked third shift. That love and my Cinderella experience resulted in a Perfect Moment that I cherish to this day.