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happiness anywhere and everywhere. Truth be told, happiness is like the artist’s muse. She is very whimsical and loves to play little tricks on us. If we search too hard, happiness will slip away. And then, when we are not really concentrating on capturing her, she will suddenly appear in our peripheral vision wearing a green silk gown, winking at us.
Happiness visits you when you’re swimming in a pool and you notice how your pastel blue nail polish matches the water. Or she comes to you when you’re standing in your kitchen chopping up tomatoes for ratatouille and your husband comes up behind you, takes you in his arms for a quick dance across the linoleum floor. Then again, she might perch on your shoulder one evening while you are sitting all alone in your parked car listening to an old Neil Young song. Happiness often comes in the most unlikely and unexpected situations, when we are not really looking for it. You are at your mother’s funeral and suddenly your father—yes, your father, who has always been so stoic and quiet—gets up and sings the old Bob Hope tune “Thanks for the Memories.”
In the middle of the tears, you find yourself laughing.
But, here’s the difficulty—these moments are all very different and completely unique. Still, they are always available to you if you open the window to your heart. Sometimes, this simply means getting out in nature more. Walking on the beach. Then again, the muse of happiness might pop up indoors—in a church or a temple. She occasionally pals around with Bacchus, the god of wine—but not all the time. She’s much too fickle for that. You might find yourself feeling very blue, as if nothing ever changes and your luck has run out, and so you hunker down and focus on what’s in front of you. There is a task at hand, and you must let go of your grasping for success or money or love or whatever. The muse of happiness responds to this scenario, because you see, she’s also a little like that frisky orange tabby cat you want to catch and hold. She runs away from you, but then you get busy and work and suddenly, feeling slightly ignored, she will appear out of nowhere and jump on your desk. Yes, doing simple ordinary work—even washing the dishes or raking leaves in the backyard—will coax the muse of happiness out of hiding.
But be on the lookout, because the form she takes will probably not be what you planned or expected. However, it will be perfectly right for you at that moment in time.
The truth is, she will appear wherever and whenever you are truly alive and present to the moment, when you stop to breathe, and to truly love this life.
Joie de vivre is an attitude. It’s a decision you make to live a life of joy. It’s an invitation to this dance called life. All you have to do is leave the door slightly ajar and listen for the music.
French Lessons
THE NEXT TIME you’re out in the world, stop and focus. Try to be present to the simple joys you can find when doing everyday, ordinary tasks. Open your eyes to the possibilities for joy in simple and very familiar activities such as grocery shopping, gardening, cooking, sitting in a park, having a picnic, enjoying a bath, or even doing housework. Yes, even sweeping the kitchen floor can bring you joie de vivre, if you take your time and focus on the rhythm and motion of the broom, the whispering-whisking sound it makes and how this connects you with so many others before you who have swept a kitchen floor. And if you “dress the part,” perhaps by wearing a kerchief around your hair, you can add a little more fun and whimsy to the experience.
Once and for all, break the connection between spending money and happiness by finding experiences that bring you joy, but do not cost a thing. Take the time to feel your feelings and make a note to yourself when something very simple brings you great joy. Sources of joy are different for different people, so it’s important that you register where your personal joie de vivre “lives.” Make a list of the moments in your life in which you’ve felt most happy and consider this to be your “happiness personality profile.”
Resist chasing after happiness and give happiness a chance to sneak up on you and “find” you in unexpected moments.
Next, find your “temple” of happiness. It might be out of doors, but this place where your happiness muse visits you might be in a dusty library or a crowded coffee shop. You can encourage the muse to visit you just by showing up on a regular basis.
Be creative with less. Enjoy the ordinary moments in a marriage or friendship or any relationship. Be playful. Be kind to yourself.
And finally, dance.
CHAPTER TWO
La Femme d’un Certain Âge
Age does not protect you from love. But love, to some extent, protects you from age.
—ANAÏS NIN
YOU SEE THEM all around Paris. The stylish and oh-so-elegant older woman. She’s the one standing in front of you at the rue de Rivoli crosswalk. First, you notice her silhouette. There is something unmistakably sophisticated about her. Perhaps it’s her posture. Her confident stance. From the back, you have no idea what her age might be. But you know, or should I say, you sense a certain worldliness. She’s just too confident and contained to be une jeune fille (a young girl). There’s something about her clothing—the sheer black stockings, the high heel pumps, the secret agent trench coat, and those big sunglasses, even though it’s a gray day—but it’s more than this. It’s her attitude. She knows where she’s going. And yet, she offers you a certain mystery. The promise of adventure. Perhaps she’s planning a trip to Prague. Or she has a summerhouse in Deauville. Perhaps she has a lover there? Or a gentleman friend that she’s just very fond of—no one really knows for sure.
She’s just come from W.H. Smith. Yes, the English language bookstore. She likes to keep up her English language skills and she wants to read that new American novel in its original language. She is carrying a small tote and inside of it, you will find a lilac-colored box of macarons from the famous Ladurée. She is hosting a dinner party tonight and this little sweet will be part of the evening’s celebration. Nothing fancy. Just elegant. Her daughter and son-in-law are coming home for the weekend and bringing the grandchildren. Her brother will be there, along with a colleague from Italy. And of course, our elegant femme d’un certain âge has invited her sister, the architect, who lives in Toulouse, but is visiting Paris for business.
So you can see, the party is quite a mixed bag, and intergenerational. This is one of the secrets of Frenchwomen. They don’t just pal around with women their own age, but they enjoy the company of lots of different people—young, old, male, female, urban, rural, French, and non-French. And they enjoy being a mentor. They don’t hide the fact that they’ve lived and learned and traveled and have had a wide range of experiences.
Our femme doesn’t fuss over the dinner party. She’s prepared a traditional French cassoulet (it was her mother’s recipe) earlier in the day or the day before and since she’s purchased the bread and the dessert, now it’s just a matter of making a salad, putting out the cheese for the dessert course, and chilling the champagne and opening the wine.
Imagine her arriving home. She opens the door to the courtyard, her high heels making a pleasant clicking sound on the cobblestone, and then she quickly makes her way up the three flights of the winding circular staircase. If we were invisible and could observe her unnoticed, this is what we would see: she takes off her sunglasses, her scarf, her coat, and we see her face for the first time. Yes, our French femme d’un certain âge is what we would call “middle-aged.” But she is so much more than this. Yes, there are crinkles around her eyes. Obviously, she’s laughed and cried many times in her life. Oh, and there’s the slight parenthesis lines framing her mouth. All those smiles. Thousands of them. Her hair might be colored a rich chestnut and then again, it might be artfully streaked with silver. If our femme is from the Left Bank and owns a gallery, she may have colored her hair a shocking shade of red. She wears a classic black dress, but it is adorned with the most exquisite jewelry—each piece holds a memory, an experience. There is the big silver bangle from her trip last year to Morocco. There