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What makes me happy now

‘This was happiness � not a permanent state but
a vanishing point’: what makes me happy now
In a series of short essays, writers consider what happiness
means to them now, after the reckoning of the past few years

Sarah Holland�Batt
Sat 18 Feb 2023 19.00 GMT
W
hen someone you love is unhappy, it’s easy to become a fellow
traveller in their unhappiness. I know this because I carried my
father’s sorrow about his Parkinson’s disease with me for 20
years. It was a misery that only deepened with time. In his last
years, when I’d visit Dad in his nursing home, he’d cry uncontrollably.
Sometimes, a word or phrase would set him off: any mention of Winston
Churchill or the war. Other times, it would be spontaneous, disconnected from
any clear source. Geriatricians call this pathological crying: an unhappiness that
blows over you like weather. When Dad cried, I’d keep my tone light and try to
steer his attention elsewhere. Afterwards, I’d go back to my car and cry myself.

Relatives of people who are incarcerated talk about doing time with their loved
ones and I knew an echo of that feeling. Guilt rode alongside me when I dived
into the ocean, ate at a good restaurant, or boarded a plane. I was haunted by
the thought of my father in his small, circumscribed room, by his severance
from the world’s freedoms and pleasures.

When Dad died, I expected the guilt and sadness to lift. Instead, it was replaced
with grief and imposed loneliness. Dad died in March of 2020, just as the world
stilled to watch the slow and mesmerising dawn of something enormous. Rules
came in waves: masks, isolation protocols, exercise radii. Groceries appeared on
my doorstep. Flowers arrived. The only sign these deliveries were carried to me
by human hands was the sound of footsteps receding down the stairs when I
opened the door. I didn’t see a friend in person for months.

My mother and I recorded our eulogies in our houses, like

strange, isolated performance pieces of grief. I filmed mine in the middle of the
day, and as I started to speak, my neighbour revved his leaf-blower on his
driveway. I timed my eulogy so it fell in his breaks.

The weeks blurred together, shapeless. I spent my one hour outdoors a day
walking along the river to Brisbane’s Newstead park. Cockatoos flocked there at
dusk, screeching in the Norfolk pines. The days got shorter. The air was cool,
the river a cold nerve.

I started to rely on these walks. They were an off-ramp from nostalgia: walking,
I existed only in the present tense. I studied the faces of joggers and
rollerbladers. I snuck photos on my iPhone of the dogs I saw, and texted them
rollerbladers. I snuck photos on my iPhone of the dogs I saw, and texted them
to a friend: a snowy white samoyed, a borzoi, a black chihuahua in a green vest.
I came to know the park’s regulars: the drinker who fed the pigeons; the
painfully thin woman who powerwalked morning and night; the shirtless guy
who shuffled along in thongs, his huge potbelly shining in the sun. Solitude and
grief still rhymed, though the grief was duller now.

When my circle of possible movement expanded, I climbed Mount Coot-tha,

scrambling up its heart-starting face. As the rules relaxed, I got up on Saturdays
before dawn, made a vacuum flask of tea, and drove past the horse paddocks of
Samford or the wonky smokestacks of the Glasshouse Mountains to different
trailheads. Sometimes friends joined me. Other times, I went alone. I went
when it rained. I went when it was cold. That was what I did: I got up and I
walked.

At first, I didn’t think about why I was walking. Walking had become a ritual:
structure for my unstructured days. Paradoxically, I felt less alone out in the
forest, far from humanity, than I did in my own home. One morning, climbing
steep stairs in a cutting wind, I realised I felt happy. Not a jolting, giddy
happiness, not the peaking type with its inevitable trough – but a contentment
that came from a sense of my body moving in time.

A year after my father died, I booked a cabin at Springbrook

for a week, overlooking the gorge’s pour of dense greenery. The trip was a
pilgrimage of sorts: my father had taken me walking along Springbrook’s trails
as a child. But by the time I arrived, it was raining: sheeting, monsoonal. Clouds
drifted past the cabin at eye level. The weather app showed nothing but storms.

Stubbornly, I set out for a walk in a brief patch of sun, which held out just until I
hit the bottom of the loop’s sharply descending 450 stairs, then the torrential
rain returned. Leeches seethed in the mud. My shoes were soaking. There was
no time to think of my father, no room for the past. The rain and the huge spray
from the thundering waterfall made it hard to gauge where I was. I missed a
fork I knew well. I expected the trail to curve around to my right, but it never
did. After 15 minutes, I realised my mistake: I was heading down one of the
great walks of Australia, a 54 kilometre unbroken trail cutting right across the
entire national park.
Slogging back uphill, I ran into a group of hysterical teenagers who’d taken the
same wrong turn. Hopelessly out of their depth, they were wearing street shoes
with no socks, and were covered in mud and leeches. One of the girls was
sobbing. I sprayed their ankles with repellent from my bag, and led them back
to the stairs, which were safer to take than continuing around the other sloping
half of the loop, which would be a mudslide by now.

Heading up the stairs, I tried to put some distance between myself and the
shrieking teenagers, but they closed the distance. I sprinted up a few flights,
and they sprinted too. There was no escaping them. They wanted to keep me in
sight: I was their ticket back to the car park. The stairs were endless. The rain
didn’t let up.

Finally, we were safe. As I pulled out of the car park, the teenagers were peeling
off their shoes and screaming about the leeches on their feet. Back at my cabin,
I got a fire started, and ran a bath. I was relieved to find no leeches on my feet,
and strangely exhilarated, too.

This, I thought, was happiness: not a permanent state or a destination, but a

vanishing point you could only keep in view by putting one foot in front of the
other. To get closer, you had to keep moving.

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