{"id":254888,"date":"2023-03-25T22:02:23","date_gmt":"2023-03-26T02:02:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/?p=254888"},"modified":"2023-03-25T22:02:23","modified_gmt":"2023-03-26T02:02:23","slug":"helen-garner-on-happiness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2023\/03\/25\/helen-garner-on-happiness\/","title":{"rendered":"Helen Garner on happiness"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>&#8220;What <em>is<\/em> happiness, anyway? Does anybody know? It\u2019s taken me 80 years to figure out that it\u2019s not a tranquil, sunlit realm at the top of the ladder you\u2019ve spent your whole life hauling yourself up, rung by rung. It\u2019s more like the thing that Christians call grace: you can\u2019t earn it, you can\u2019t strive for it, it\u2019s not a reward for virtue. It exists all right, it will be given to you, but it\u2019s fluid, it\u2019s evasive, it\u2019s out of reach. It\u2019s something you glimpse in the corner of your eye until one day you\u2019re up to your neck in it. And before you\u2019ve had time to take a big gasp and name it, it\u2019s gone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So I\u2019m not going to spend what\u2019s left of my life hanging round waiting for it. I\u2019m going to settle for small, random stabs of <em>extreme interestingness \u2013 <\/em>moments of intense awareness of the things I\u2019m about to lose, and of gladness that they exist. Things that remind me of other things. Tiny scenes. Words that people choose, their accidentally biblical turns of phrase. Hand-lettered signs, quotes from books, offhand remarks that make me think of dead people, or of living ones I can no longer stand the sight of. I plan to keep writing them down, praising them, arranging them like stepping stones into the dark. Maybe they\u2019ll lead me somewhere good before I shrivel up and blow away.&#8221; (<a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/culture\/2023\/feb\/05\/helen-garner-on-happiness-its-taken-me-80-years-to-figure-out-its-not-a-tranquil-sunlit-realm\">via<\/a>) <\/p>\n<div class=\"syndication-links\"><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&#8220;What is happiness, anyway? Does anybody know? It\u2019s taken me 80 years to figure out that it\u2019s not a tranquil, sunlit realm at the top of the ladder you\u2019ve spent your whole life hauling yourself up, rung by rung. It\u2019s more like the thing that Christians call grace: you can\u2019t earn it, you can\u2019t strive &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2023\/03\/25\/helen-garner-on-happiness\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Helen Garner on happiness&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crsspst_to_mathewingramblogwordpresscom":false,"mf2_syndication":[],"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-254888","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/254888","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=254888"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/254888\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=254888"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=254888"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=254888"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}