A Short Guide to a Happy Life by Anna Quindlen Page B

kind of a drag and who weren’t sure if they could really hack it and who thought life was a bummer. And I knew that I had undergone a sea change. Because I was never again going to be able to see life as anything except a great gift.
    It’s ironic that we forget so often how wonderful life really is. We have more time than ever before to remember it. The men and women of generations past had to work long, long hours to support lots and lots of children in tiny, tiny houses. The women worked in factories and sweatshops and then at home, too, with two bosses, the one who paid them, and the one they were married to, who didn’t.

    There are new generations of immigrants now, who work just as hard, but those of us who are second and third and fourth generation are surrounded by nice cars, family rooms, patios, pools—the things our grandparents thought only rich people had.
Yet somehow, instead of rejoicing, we’ve found the glass half empty. Our jobs take too
much out of us and don’t pay enough.We’re expected to pick the kids up at preschool and run the microwave at home.

    C’mon, let’s be honest. We have an embarrassment of riches. Life is good.
    I don’t mean in any cosmic way. I never think of my life, or my world, in any big cosmic way. I think of it in all its small component parts: the snowdrops, the daffodils; the feeling of one of my kids sitting close beside me on the couch; the way my husband looks when he reads with the lamp behind him; fettuccine Alfredo; fudge;
Gone with the Wind, Pride and Prejudice.
Life is made up of moments, small pieces of glittering mica in a long stretch of gray cement. It would be wonderful if they came to us unsummoned, but particularly in lives as busy as the ones most of us lead now, that won’t happen. We have to teach ourselves how to make room for
them, to love them, and to live, really live.
    I learned to live many years ago. Something really bad happened to me,
something that changed my life in ways that, if I had had a choice, it would never have
been changed at all. And what I learned from it is what, today, sometimes seems to
be the hardest lesson of all.
    I learned to love the journey, not the destination. I learned that this is not a dress rehearsal, and that today is the only guarantee you get.
    I learned to look at all the good in the world and to try to give some of it back, because I believed in it completely and utterly. And I tried to do that, in part, by telling others what I had learned, even though so many people may have thought I sounded like a Pollyanna. By telling them this: Consider the lilies of the field. Look at the fuzz on a baby’s ear. Read in the backyard with the sun on your face. Learn to be happy. And think of life as a terminal illness, because, if you do, you will live it with joy and passion, as it ought to be lived.

    Anyone can learn all those things, out there in the world. You just need to get a life, a real life, a full life, a professional life, yes, but another life, too. School never ends. The classroom is everywhere. The exam comes at the very end. No man ever said on his deathbed I wish I had spent more time at the office.
    I found one of my best teachers on the boardwalk at Coney Island many years ago. It was December, and I was doing a story about how the homeless suffer in the winter months. He and I sat on the edge of the wooden supports, dangling our feet over the
side, and he told me about his schedule, pan-handling the boulevard when the summer
crowds were gone, sleeping in a church when the temperature went below freezing,
hiding from the police amid the Tilt-A-Whirl and the Cyclone and some of the
other seasonal rides.

    But he told me that most of the time he stayed on the boardwalk, facing the water, just the way we were sitting now, even when it got cold and he had to wear his newspapers after he read them. And I asked him why. Why didn’t he go to one of the shelters? Why