There’s a lot to be said for having a happy place. A little corner of memory carved out for deep breathing and a calm heartbeat, a thought that the world can’t touch, a moment that is only yours. A happy place can be anything you like. It doesn’t even have to be a real place in the world, or a place at all. Maybe your happiness is that first bite of a chocolate chip cookie fresh from the oven, or the smell that wafts up off pavement wet with rain. Maybe it’s in the crunch of an orange-red leaf beneath your boot or the scrunch of damp sand between your toes. Who knows? It’s up to you to decide.
But for a little happy-place-building inspiration, I thought I might tell you about mine.
It starts with a rainy day on Roátan.
My mom and I had traveled to the tiny island just the two of us, through planes and ferries and car rides. It was an unparalleled adventure, deserving of more journal entries than I had pens for.
Today we were going diving. As a boat whipped us out onto the open ocean in the middle of a storm, I snapped my dive goggles down to keep the stinging cold water from pelting my eyes and I laughed. The rain hurt but I laughed because there was so much of it and so many grey clouds above me and water all around me and also water pouring down from the sky, and what’s a kid from the desert going to do with that moment but be delighted? I didn’t worry about the drought back home. I didn’t have to worry about anything.
I worried even less once they’d toppled me backwards off the boat, dive gear and all. I slipped below the surface and into silence. Just my breath, and me watching the way the rain roiled the surface far above. Down here it was quiet. Despite the storm, the reef still seemed bright and all the fish were still colorful and their little homes in the coral even more so—I felt a fleeting wish that our own suburban houses weren’t all the same colors and shapes. Then I swam on, content just breathing and being.
I turned away from the reef on a whim. I had been pretending to be a mermaid and laughing underwater, and then I spun myself around, away from the wall. For a moment I forgot the cardinal rule of diving. I stopped breathing. For all the color and detail I’d been seeing on the reef, I had almost missed the most spectacular view of my life.
It was nothing and everything all at once. It was just this endless expanse of blue, so far reaching that I couldn’t see anything beyond or anything in it. My senses felt heightened. I just floated, suspended, and saw into the blue. I thought about how small I was and how infinite this world is and how much of it there is left for me to see and explore and share. And for once the universe didn’t scare me so much.
This memory is so special to me. It's begun to bear a sense of calm. I can disappear into this happy place for a moment when my mind is feeling stormy, and emerge feeling the way I did that day. When I emerged from the water, the world was fresh, the way things always are after a good rain.
