How I found happiness on a dollar bill, or it’s all Mark’s fault

It’s Sunday.

I’m sitting & staring at my desk. You heard me. Staring. Not writing.

I have stacks of unfinished stories, scripts, and one lonely play. All wanting my attention. All shouting at me.

The longer I stare the more I can feel the cold comfort of doubt.

Mark Morford’s book, The Daring Spectacle, sits at one end of my desk. It mocks me. I’m only a quarter way through it and with each story I find little hidden pleasures. I don’t know how Mark does it. He doesn’t have writers…whatever. He espouses long, insightful, poignant paragraphs of epic, if not heartfelt proportions I don’t even have the words to express, or know how to spell.

I now hate Mark. Screw him and his immense talent.

Scanning what little open space that is left that isn’t reminding me I’m not doing what I tell people I do, I find a hidden moleskin notebook which I discover obtains the secret to my happiness and peace.

In it a dollar bill. And on this particular dollar bill is scrawled four potent words. They trigger a flood of insights into my life, and start me on the winding road to which I believe is happiness. Or to the liquor cabinet.

The night I wrote those words down, I was in trouble. I was marching down a career path that made me nauseous to think about. I had no friends nearby, no passions, no ambitions, no confidence. I had lost, by that time, any real belief in a future.

The optimism I’d carried so easily through grade school was a distant memory, by then as alien as photos from someone else’s life.

Small obstacles completely derailed me. I expected to fail at everything, and people outside my immediate circle generally scared me. It was a particularly bad night in a bad year, and I was in mourning for myself.

I was also totally naked.

When you’re depressed you don’t want to leave the shower. It’s one of the few safe, warm and inviting places to be. I found it difficult to turn off the water, because then it was back to real life. My cold, unpredictable life.

One night, I took a shower. I stayed in there so long, enjoying the heat, that the water started to run cool. As dreadful as it was, I had no choice but to get out. To make things worse, the window in that bathroom never closed properly, even in the winter. I knew the icy Oregon air was pouring in continuously throughout my shower, filling up the bathroom on the other side of the shower door.

I had a routine for this. Push in the faucet, fling open the door and grab the towel off the rack as quickly as possible. Tualatin was suffering a cold snap that night, and the bathroom would be as frigid as a meat locker, so I had to be quick.

The moment came; I slammed in the faucet, tore open the door and… no towel! In my funk I had forgotten to bring one with me. I jumped out, shivering, and forget shrinkage, body parts were finding refuge elsewhere. As I searched through all the cabinets…no towel anywhere in the bathroom.

Defeated, I stood on the mat and let the cold air overtake me. I watched the ice fog pour over the window sill like liquid nitrogen. I just let it have its way with me. I didn’t get mad, I didn’t shiver or scramble to dry off. I just let it feel like whatever it was going to feel like, and I noticed something peculiar.

It didn’t hurt me. It wasn’t excruciating, or even unpleasant, just colder than I’d like. My choice to give in to the cold, rather than escape it, robbed it of its power to make me miserable. It was only when I cowered and shivered that it was so awful. I was impervious to it, so long as I didn’t insist it not be cold. Why would I ever resent the cold again?

I was immune. I had conquered it.

The cold could never make me suffer, only I could. My brain started to overflow with the implications of this discovery. Was everything like this? Could I disarm any threat, just by letting it be what it is?

I had to write this down. Still naked, I ransacked the bathroom a second time, for something to write with and a piece of paper. I found a Sharpie marker and a dollar bill in my pants pockets on my dirty clothes that were shoved off to the side.

Lost for words, I scrawled:

Less resentment
Less suffering

It wasn’t Shakespeare (even he would’ve brought a towel to the shower) but it didn’t matter. The words were not the message, just reminders of it. I couldn’t forget it anyway.

I knew this was big. Huge even.

Nudity begets discovery. I bet Shakespeare never said anything quite…pedestrian.

The whole scene really felt quite historic. Not only could I see how sublime a revelation this would prove to be, but it happened in a remarkably similar manner to a much more famous discovery, twenty-two centuries earlier.

The ancient Greek scientist Archimedes also had the discovery of his lifetime while he was bathing.

He had been ordered, by a cranky and unreasonable king, to solve an extremely difficult problem. His Royal Highness suspected that the crown that had been made for him was not pure gold like he’d been promised, but was made with cheaper metals. Cursed with a reputation for being the local smarty-pants, Archimedes was charged with determining whether the crown was pure gold or not, though he could not dismantle or otherwise ruin the crown.

The crown was far too irregular and intricate to calculate its volume, so he had no way of knowing if it was as dense as gold. For days, he swore, kicked cats and yelled at passers-by. Out of ideas, he closed up his laboratory and drew himself a bath.

When he lowered himself in, water spilled over the sides, and The Answer struck him. He could submerge the crown, and measure the rise in the water level to determine its volume perfectly. He sprang from the tub and bounded out into the street, dripping and nude, gaily shouting “Eureka!” (I have found it!)

I should have shouted “Eureka!” and streaked out the door in similar fashion, but running through the rain-drenched, frozen streets of Tualatin in my birthday suit didn’t have the same appeal as cobblestones in the warm Greek sun. At least so I’ve been told.

Okay, back to me…

Of course, simply knowing what the problem was, and it really is the problem, didn’t automatically make life worthwhile overnight. It didn’t make me a disciplined or a courageous person. I was still timid, socially retarded, depleted of the confidence I had as an overachieving-underachiever middle-schooler. I still had bad habits, irrational fears, poor willpower, zero organizational skills and the only identifiable passions I had were soccer and art/writing. I still felt very much behind where I could be, where I should be.

No, in terms of where I was in life, my discovery didn’t change the score at all.

But it seemed to change all the rules.

It gave me, for the first time, a direction. I knew right from that cold, clear moment, that this truth would never change. Finally there was a light in the distance that I could always count on to find my bearings: my hell comes from inside, and it’s my responsibility.

In this new paradigm, I had access to all the power I needed to be happy, if I so chose. Power, I would learn, is nothing but responsibility. I have power over my happiness precisely to the extent I take responsibility for it. Same goes for achievement, wealth, discipline, even the state of the world itself. I suppose.

Circumstances would not, it turns out, be the death of me. My problems were not problems at all but for how I related to them.

And that’s where I invested my energies from that point on. Figuring out how to change myself, not push the river.

I turned to self-improvement and spirituality, and began the slow process of rebuilding myself. As I learned about how people have approached the conundrum of suffering, I kept seeing my same discovery in different words. Most notably, Krishnamurti summed up the essence of his life’s teachings with the same message, though much more elegantly. When asked the secret to his unwavering happiness he said, “I don’t mind what happens.”

So I didn’t exactly invent it. But at that time, I had not heard of Krishnamurti, or read Emerson, or Tolle, or Kabir. This was brand new territory to me, and life was never the same.

That’s not to say I never suffered again, not at all. I still do. I’m much better, but still delightfully imperfect. I do worry and resent, sometimes. Right now its directed at Mark. And I still have problems.

But I know exactly where to look for solutions.

Inward.

Now, I suppose I should just grab the first story/script/play that’s on top and start writing, but I’m thinking that perhaps a little inspiration is in order. You know, relax the mind and the muse will come.

Or I could read. (The Daring Spectacle, page 117, Thou Shalt Not Kid Thyself)

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