The other day, my wife was describing for me a scene from the book she is writing. We were standing together in the kitchen. I was stirring a pot of chili and she was unpacking some groceries. She was in the middle of telling me how she had been driving home, listening to Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue, when the scene suddenly came to her.
The scene itself is not important for this account. What is important, really important, is what next happened. As she was describing the scene, Rhapsody in Blue was playing on the kitchen stereo. As she outlined the emotional climax of her scene, the music also came to one of its breath-taking crescendos and suddenly she found herself weeping uncontrollably.
She was not sad. She was not upset, worried or even menopausal. What I watched come over my lovely wife's face, and indeed, her entire being at that moment, was what I believe people refer to as rapture. Joy. Bliss.
In her case, the music, married to the beauty in the scene she had imagined, completely overwhelmed her and she gave in to it. She allowed herself to be taken over by it.
And that's the trick. Allowing it in.
Tears of joy have a very different energy than tears of sadness. There's a powerfully attractive magnetism to them. Grinning from ear to ear, I hugged her. Her sobbing was such a simple, pure expression of what is, to my mind, our essence. And it occurred to me, moments later, how unfortunate it is that we don't witness scenes like this more often.
I have been trying to bask, lately. Each day, I try and give myself as many opportunities as possible to simply bliss out over something. Yesterday, after driving my children to school, I deliberately took the longer, scenic route home, knowing that it would take me to a particularly serene vista. Alone on a country road hill-top, I stopped the car, got out and just stood there. The silence, the sun, the smell of the freshly-turned earth, the million and one hues of brown and green stretching out for hundreds of rolling acres before me, all worked their magic. Had Gershwin been there as well, I too would've been in tears.
This was not some hidden Shangri-la that I alone had discovered. It's a place on a road that is travelled by and known to many people, yet I've seldom seen anyone else walking there or standing there or basking.
Everyone of us is capable of encountering, on a regular basis, the kind of joy that my wife experienced in the kitchen that day. In fact, I believe we're hard-wired for it. But to do so, you have to allow it to happen. You have to stop, now and then, when something or someone catches your heart. Stop and let that thing in. Let it overwhelm you.
Wouldn't it be marvellous, for instance, to live in a world where traffic was backed up for miles on the DVP not due to an accident or a breakdown but because we were all getting out of our cars to stop and drink in an exceptionally beautiful sunset? Imagine kilometre after kilometre of humans staring westward, tears of joy streaming down their cheeks.
I think that alone might fix the hole in the Ozone layer.
"Hello, OnStar? I just wanted to say I love you, man."
Durham resident Neil Crone, actor-comic-writer, saves some of his best lines for his columns.
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