Apertures for Happiness

At Saturday yoga, I did a little experiment inspired by watching one six-and-a-half-year-old dancer maintain a genuine smile for two hours. I wanted to see if I (sixty-nine-and-three-fourths) could smile (sort of) for an entire 90-minute-class.

After about four minutes, the smile faded--not because I wasn't reasonably happy, which I was, but because there was a conflict between my facial muscles and my knee muscles, resulting in a furrowed unibrow.

When I finally made it to crooked tree position, I tried again, but smiling felt forced and distracting.  I needed to focus on posture and balance or my tree would come crashing down.

I keep in my mind's eye and ear memories of things the dancer said--always good fodder for pleasant facial moves.

Like this: Wiping something off my face after our swim, she'd said,  "I feel like I'M the grandmother right now!"  When summoning a memory of that comment, my face rearranged itself into a smile.

But how to keep up smiling for ninety minutes?  How does a child do it and I find it so hard? The more I focused on trying, the more impossible it became.  Children don't think so much, they simply respond to moments of joy as they come.

My mind found the track where I keep my to-do list and I began sorting the items to check off on the way home.  I noticed, that in my pondering mode,  I had missed the cue to lower myself into a bridge on the floor. Ugh!  When little girl dancers miss a cue, they just carry on.   In Bridge Pose, I realized I needed a pedicure and made a note to add that to the list, along with installing Lightroom for a class, along with going to Trader Joes, along with re-scheduling a dentist appointment I had missed.

I'm here to report, in short, my experiment didn't pan out.

A child doesn't bother with lists and clocks and plans; someone else will take care of the logistics.  Therefore, she is free to inhabit the minutes she's in without jumping forward or backward in time.

For a moment on Thursday, I thought it was Friday.  "Do you ever get the days of the week mixed up?" I asked Elena.

"No," she said. "I never know what day it is in the first place."

In photography terms, we adjust the camera's aperture to let in more or less light.  Most secure children have wide open apertures, light streaming in from everywhere.

As we grow older, we inevitably encounter experiences that close the aperture, sometimes a little, sometimes a lot.  We have things to do, memories to come to terms with, decisions to make.  If the experiences are traumatic, humans may even get into the habit of averting their eyes altogether in the presence of potential danger.

We can never have again the total Happiness Buttons that children do, but we can tune our own by hanging out with them more, observing them, and doing the best we can to let the light in.