Small Life, Still Life
small slice of a happy life
So I’ve noticed, in my notebooks, that I keep describing my life as small. I guess the idea here is that I used to have this great big life, and now it’s so small, you can fit it in the palm of your hand. (and I don’t mean that in disparaging way)
What I mean goes something like this: I used to go out to dinner every night. I used to go out for drinks every night. I was regularly in conversations, like real conversations, with a hundred people every day. Now I talk to maybe five. I used to wake up most mornings not knowing what I’d get into that afternoon. Now I know what will happen every morning and every night.
And as much as I enjoyed those moments when my life seemed so large, I enjoy it just as much — maybe even more — now that it’s small. Sure, occasionally, I miss some things. That flighty-yet-deep feeling of ethereal immortality you get after a night out, when you’re sitting with two friends on a fire escape, smoking cigarettes as the sun comes up. The smell and sound of a Christmas party, of mulled wine and perfumes and the jingled buzz of a room overflowing with half-drunk conversation.
But look what I traded it in for — last week we bought a soccer ball for our son and made a big deal of it. He spent the morning jumping around screaming soccer ball! Play please with soccer ball! And so we went to the park as the sun was just ripe over the purple horizon and the ground was all dewey and he ran off hollering into the green sunlight, kicking at his soccer ball with all the monomaniacal madness of Ahab chasing his whale.
That experience, that’s a small life thing. I’m trying to not get too allegorical here, but it felt as though the universe shrunk to the size of a single interaction: me watching my kid’s simple joy at a new soccer ball (and his recent epiphany that, if he kicks the soccer ball, it will fly off into the distance).
But I catch this feeling like ten times a day — as we’re lining up his toy cars, as we’re reading a book together or at the tiny zoo we visit once-a-week. The universe contracts, becomes the size of the space between us. I don’t mean in a selfish way either. This is not self-involvement because self-involvement is not rewarding. A self-involved act (or even observation) is bad karma and you know it’s bad karma as you’re doing it. This small life feeling is like, strikingly rewarding.
A small life is composed of simple incidents and small actions set against the large backdrop of, well, life-in-progress. We go to the park with the soccer ball. We line up the toys, we go to the beach. Last night, I had my son on my shoulders as we were walking through a light rain; and we passed the large windows of a karate studio and children practicing under the florescent lights inside. The whole vibe kind of reminds me of that Hockney painting. You know the one — Pool With Two Figures. I can’t really say why, but I feel like that’s a snippet of a small life right there.
Or maybe it’s a little more like that Edward Hopper painting. The one where there aren’t even any people, just the sunlight slanting through the window and the big old sea there outside. It’s a fleeting moment — you know the light will change and then die off within minutes and yet the ocean will always be there. The feeling that I’m talking about is kind of like that — the juxtaposition between a great big constant and a small moment in time.
And maybe the Hockney is like that too. Look at it again — see how swimmers are set against the backdrop of those mountains going off into the distance? That’s a bit of juxtaposition right there. I read (on Wikipedia) that, when asked about Pool With Two Figures, Hockney said, “I must admit I loved working on that picture, working with such intensity; it was marvelous doing it, really thrilling.”
That’s not far off the mark right there. Intensity might be a good word for these instances I’ve tried to use to illustrate the small life. Most of the day you’re just going along living easily and pleasantly, but then occasionally, the experience of it becomes intense. And that’s a juxtaposition too.