Just a brief midweek happy dance

I had the strangest feeling while driving home yesterday afternoon, an overwhelming lightness as of my whole being trying to smile. Could this be--happiness? For no good reason? In the middle of a ridiculously busy week?

Let me count the reasons I ought to be unhappy right now: student intransigence, campus shenanigans, financial stagnation, personal frustration over the zillion ways it's impossible to live in two counties at once. And yet I feel happier than I have in months, maybe years. 

It's true that yesterday a colleague shared with me something a student told her about my class that made me feel like Super Professor, but a solitary student comment shouldn't be enough to offset the gloom that has characterized the past year and a half of pandemic teaching. Last year at this time we were all dutifully putting one foot in front of the other to get through the day and the week and the semester, spending so much time wrangling technology for Zoom classes that we had no time to hope for happiness. This week I'll need to turn on Zoom to accommodate one student in quarantine, but the relative absence of Zoom from my daily life has lifted a curtain and let in some light.

And this semester I've also spent more time interacting with colleagues face-to-face, most meaningfully as chair of a task force charged with producing a bit of verbiage for the College's strategic plan. Sounds deadly, right? But here's the thing: this group worked really well together crafting a statement that bears none of the hallmarks of committee-produced prose. It's succinct, elegant, profound, and perhaps even inspiring. I was delighted to lead a mixed group of colleagues through the process and especially pleased to see the rookies step up to make significant contributions, suggesting hope for future campus leadership.

And I've also finally found an avenue for my own future research and writing. No one has been doing much professional development during the pandemic--I mean, who has time to write conference papers or journal articles? I've been shepherding the comedy volume through the editing process and I finally submitted the Natasha Trethewey essay to a journal, but for a long time I haven't been able to visualize any future research or writing beyond these projects. I've been wondering whether I might be reaching the end of the road as a productive scholar, but then this week I started sensing a pathway opening in a new direction, an area adjacent to my previous work but different enough to arouse my curiosity. I'm not ready to go public yet but it's exciting to see that what looks like a dead end might instead be a sharp turn into really interesting territory. 

It came to me in the middle of a long walk up the Big Horrible Hill, a hill I haven't been able to climb in months. I could blame the weather, my ridiculous schedule, or my aging joints, but the result is that I've fallen so far off my usual exercise routine that I couldn't make it all the way up the hill the first time I tried this fall. But I've been working at it--one foot in front of another, a little farther each time--and this morning I made it clear to the top and back home again without too much trouble. I'll be living on Aleve today, but there's no doubt that getting out for a challenging walk through woods suffused with autumn gold nourishes my body, mind, and soul. 

And so I feel happy--still!--despite joint pain and piles of grading and more committee work. I'm going to hold on to this feeling as long as I can because if nothing else, pandemic teaching has taught me how ephemeral happiness can be, how easy it can be to lose hope. I know it's not over and there are more challenges ahead, but just for today, let's raise a glass to happiness.