For the New Year and After, 11 Reasons to Be Happy

I promise, this won’t be treacly — something you read in one of those books people keep in their bathrooms, or on a get-well card at the drugstore. There was a time in the not-too-distant past when I might have been self-conscious about sharing this essay — but not now, not this morning anyway.

I’ve woken up in a bedroom at my mother’s home in Minnetonka, Minnesota. I’d been in New York City and made plans to visit her for a few days on my way back to the West Coast. She’s 92 now; she’ll soon be turning 93 — God willing — and seeing her, sitting with her and talking with her, holding her close and cooking for her is no longer something to take for granted, as if it ever should have been.

After clearing the dishes last night, she and I spoke in the kitchen for a long time.At one point she turned to me and said, “It’s hard getting old.”

“Tell me about it,” I said.

She looked over at me for a moment, perhaps wondering if my reply was glib. “Mom, I really want to know what you’re feeling.”

Here’s the important part — the thing that has stayed with me since yesterday evening, and will likely influence my thinking for the rest of my life.

“I’m not the person I was before.” She gauged my reaction after she’d said that, perhaps wondering if she were saying too much, sharing too much truth. I looked at her, said nothing, and must have given her the idea that I was eager to take in what she had to say, to feel for myself what she was feeling.

“I have no more plans. My whole life was about making plans: doing this, doing that, setting up this meeting, starting that organization, traveling here or there, meeting with this person or that. Now, at my age, I don’t have the energy for any of it. I don’t know what I’m doing here anymore.”

Even now, as I write this, I am struck by the notion of plans, of goals, of the very idea of there being a future — a future based on ideas I want to bring to fruition. The idea of life and life-energy; the will to think and to act in ways that make manifest the seed of my imagination. How often do I fail to see how wondrous this very human capacity is? Even, and perhaps especially now, when the world feels so dire, when there seems to be a prevailing sense of confused desperation — there is a need in me to search beyond it, to ascertain that the projection of reality I glean from the news is only a frail husk of something infinitely more real.

Nothing I will share now is difficult to obtain. None of it costs anything. And none of it is, on its face, novel. What’s needed is context. It is this: the myriad things you and I take for granted have within them multiple layers, multiple universes of meaning and of beauty. We pass over them each day. In our search for safety, for acknowledgment, for the world to be shaped and to respond as we demand, we overlook the world as it is; we fail to see them as they are — as they are meant to be seen.

As promised: 11 reasons to be happy now.

1. You can eat a sweet, crisp apple.

I once learned from Matt, my dear friend and genius musician, that the discoloration on the skin of an apple comes from the leaves of the tree shading it in varied and beautiful ways. He also told me to eat my next apple — core, stem, seeds, and all. I have never eaten an apple since without feeling a renewed reverence for apples, the presence of my friend Matt and the meaning he holds in my life.

2. You can write a letter and mail it to a friend.

So many people are lonely now — very lonely or a little lonely. Resist the temptation to avoid letting them know how much they mean to you. Get over your embarrassment for such things.

3. You can rise before dawn, step outside, and look up at the last of the stars.

Feel your smallness. Embrace your significance.

4. You can say to yourself: “I am alive. I am standing on a globe, which floats without falling into the darkness of space.”

Pause and consider how strange this is.

5. You can meet the eyes of a stranger and offer help or a smile.

When you see a person on the street today, in a store, or someone who looks needy, help them in some way, or offer them a smile. Understand that, like a piece of music, the world is not overwhelmingly huge, but rather it is comprised of the smallest things.

6.. You can move your hand at will.

Put your hand in front of you, where you can see it. Move your fingers. Note how they respond instantaneously.

7. You can marvel at bodily functions.

Next time you pee, stop and think about exactly what is happening. If this makes no sense, stop and consider why the miraculousness of this isn’t penetrating.

8. You can contemplate the mystery of every human life.

Look at any person and reflect that a human being — each one capable of love, intuition, hopes and boundless creativity—began through the joining of a man and a woman; entered the world from the body of a woman; and whose beginning was the collision of two tiny cells.

9. You can breathe.

Breathe in deeply and slowly exhale through your nose. Forgive yourself for the many times you’ve neglected to notice how you are able to do this.

10. You can take the thoughts in your head and bring them into physical reality.

Take a pen or a pencil. Write something — anything. A novel or a single word. Marvel at this.

11. You can imagine.

Imagine something, anything: a whale diving into the ocean with only its massive tail visible, or the face of someone you love. Again, marvel at this.

And so, what does this mean? It means that I have seen my mother in a way I hadn’t seen her—with a clarity and a graciousness that I hadn’t before. And in so doing, I have begun to see other things — other taken-for-granted things — in a similar way.

Why is this important?

It’s important because it is true. More truthful than the things we imbibe from the news. More important than the prejudices we are fed, the caustic thinking we embrace as our own and fail to see how alien it actually is. And mostly, because we matter. We matter to the proper functioning of the world. Because whether we are “important” in the eyes of the world or just a normal person trying our best to live out our lives, we not only “matter,” we are essential to the functioning of the world. We matter because we are miraculous beings alive at this very moment — this stage of miracles and endless possibilities.

Why Eleven Reasons?

I chose the number 11 deliberately. In Jewish mystical thought 10 often represents completeness—the Ten Commandments, the 10 sefirot, the 10 fingers by which the world is grasped. Eleven hints at what lies beyond completion, the hidden depth that both crowns and sustains the whole.

To see the ordinary as extraordinary, to reach just past what feels like an ending — or even hopelessness — this, too, is reason for happiness. Eleven is a quiet reminder that there is always more than meets the eye, a crown of wonder beyond all the counted things. 

Peter Himmelman is a Grammy and Emmy nominated performer, songwriter, film composer, visual artist and award-winning author.