The Un-Pursuit of Happiness

The really odd but wonderful thing about reading an actual book is that you automatically move slower through it. You have to turn pages. Sometimes you have to go back a few pages to check a name or to underline something that you don't want melting into the other words and thus making it so hard to find again.

Some books are even slower. Meander is a good word for them. Like being a leaf on a stream. Or sitting and watching a river flow - it's mesmerizing and yet so simple. I am reading such a book. Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry. It is the story of a very ordinary man who lives in a poor, ordinary southern town by the edge of a river. A town that no mover or shaker would even consider for two seconds as important for the pursuit of happiness in any form.

This book has made me question that word - pursuit. It's a word that is in our very Declaration of Independence. The pursuit of happiness - it is our right. Like many phrases, we feel like we know what it means....this pursuing. But it is a phrase that engenders a kind of frenetic pacing. Pursuit implies that the goal has not yet been attained. So, we are a nation in - pursuit of something elusive, perhaps. We thrive on slogans that excite change, cry newer and better, bigger, prettier, more powerful still. We just keep pursuing these changing things because, by gummit, it is our RIGHT.

I have grown to wonder if it might have been more wise to say, That all men have a right to life, liberty, and to dwell in contentment. Men have not only a right but a duty to dwell in contentment. There are so many voices shouting at them that what they want is change - to never be satisfied. The pushy world keeps telling them what to do and feel. What constitutes a failure. What constitutes a success.

The world never wants us to rest content. Contentment sits and ruminates on the beauty. It chews its food slowly. It discovers really deep truths about human nature and friendship and the natural world - even if it decides to live in a physical space or a space in the heart no bigger than a postage stamp. It is the resting that brings wisdom and makes a heart larger. It is the resting the constitutes happiness. Constant Change never does.

Jayber Crow, the unlikely hero of this book, after a short stint in the world seeking adventure and excitement, decides to go back home to his old small town by a river where he lived as a child - a place where he discovers to his amazement and joy that people still remember who he is even after many years. They remember his name and who his relations were. He has a context and a place there.

Jayber becomes the town barber simply because he discovered quite by accidental necessity that he was good at haircuts. He lives in the rooms above the barber shop. Not rich, not influential, but content to be just that. He says, "After I got to Port William, I didn't feel any longer that I needed to look around to see if there was someplace I would like better. I quit wondering what I was going to make of myself. A lot of my doubts and questions were settled. ...I was Port Williams' bachelor barber, and a number of satisfactions were available to me..."

He goes on to describe that because he is the barber, he knows the particular look and shape of the heads and faces of most of the people in the town as he cuts their hair and shaves their cheeks. He grows to love his customers who come. He describes them with words that show he has had time to observe, and carefully, a small subset of the total number of men on earth. But Jayber sees them. They become important to us because Jayber had time to bring them to the fore. It slows us down and what we once saw as a mass of mankind pursuing happiness in a general sense - we now see in slow motion as particular men who matter profoundly to each other even though they lived in a town not even worthy of a black dot on a map. Pursuit makes us miss in a blur, what might have made us content if we had just stopped to linger and ponder and not worry about the elusive happiness out THERE by missing the actual contentment right HERE.

He becomes the Church cleaner after the older gentleman, who had done it for years, cannot do it anymore. Jayber takes that job seriously and cleans everything minutely. He grows to love this one particular room filled with old pews and sunlight. And the fact that he put so much of himself into making it shine, he decides that maybe he should go to Church on Sundays since he is so invested in the room. Experiencing the beauty of that room and his part in its beauty, re-enkindles his faith.

He becomes the official grave digger of the town when the old man who always dug the graves, finds that he can still dig but he can't climb out of the holes. Jayber learns to dig the graves deep and precise. It is hard work but he learns to persevere. The connection with the history of his town is here. And as he lives there longer, he knows more of the people who are buried in his graves. And there is no morbidness to his job. He grows closer to the people and feels a real rootedness to those who have gone on but have also stayed in the Churchyard. He begins to feel a love for those who, in life, he did not care for just because they are buried here with the town and were a vital part of its small history. This charity and understanding came about by the simple act of digging graves.

These jobs are not important in the world's eyes. He "could have done better for himself" the world might say. How often do we have that mindset? Sometimes I think we have fallen into the trancelike trajectory: do well in high school so you can get into a good college, do well in college so you can be successful in the world. Live in the right neighborhood. Know the influencers. Make money. Never be satisfied with anything that does not cry success to the rest of our peers.

Do we have the courage to say to our children: you don't need to go to college if you don't think you want to go. I would entertain your thoughts on another plan and help you to achieve it. Work with your hands, be a plumber, an electrician, drive a train if you want to. Travel places. Have a small place in the city where you can settle into a neighborhood and get involved in local politics if you want. Success is pondering. Success is carefully looking around. Success is seeing people and places and your relationship to them no matter how insignificant the world would consider them. Success is having the courage to be content in what YOU have chosen and not what the world has chosen for you. Success is seeing the small world you have been given to see and learning to love it deeply and well. To know it like the back of your hand. For love comes from knowledge. That takes time. That takes a settled contentment. It brings a dignity to the soul that pursuing a golden elusiveness never will.

Pursue contentment where you find it - no matter where.

I had the chance to observe my grandsons at play over a few weeks this past summer. It was eye opening and truly lovely for me to watch them get excited about everything I have come to not even see anymore. The way doors open. The way you can wedge yourself between the screen door and the wooden door and suddenly be in your own little world. Reveling in Toy trains, and running up to REAL trains as they listened to Grandpa's enthusiastic cries when seeing an engine up close. They spent a total of a half hour alone fascinated by a drain near a fountain and how the water flowed down into it. They did this together and kept looking at each other and laughing in delight. They relished bananas. They swam goldfish crackers into their mouths. They cared not a fig if they spilled water on their shirts. They watched baristas make coffee drinks behind a counter in fascination. When was the last time I EVER did that? But preparation of food is really fascinating if you think about it. Being a cook or a barista would bring lots of pondering if approached with the mindset of contentment. My grandsons taught me a lot.

Success is observation. Observation over time helps you to belong to your surroundings. Your familiar surroundings and the people in them can slowly bring contentment or wisdom when they are mulled over and committed to. Like Jaber, I want for myself and for those I love to find a place where

"I didn't feel any longer that I needed to look around to see if there was someplace I would like better. I quit wondering what I was going to make of myself."

Jayber is important. Thank you Wendell Berry for writing this delightfully slow and meandering story. For showing us the beauty of contentment.