Day 261: Cherry

When I was a kid we’d have this iced bun cake for dessert sometimes. Do you know the kind I mean? It came in a round plastic container, a ring of bread buns with icing on top, surrounding one central bun, which, on top of the icing, was decorated with a single glacé cherry.

Now, this central bun with the cherry on top was the best bun, demonstrably, and my sister and I would fight furiously over it. Some days I would successfully and honourably make my appeal to the Court of Parents that, as I had cleared the dinner plates and brought in the dessert, I had earned the cherry bun. Some days my sister would do something conniving and manipulative to secure the cherry bun for herself. Now and again my father would take the cherry bun, to avoid arguments, and because he was biggest. Once, my mother tried to claim that she was entitled to the cherry bun, as she had spent all day cooking and serving the meal we’d just eaten, and had in fact been the one to traipse all through the supermarket on a rainy afternoon and pick up the iced bun cake in the first place. The rest of us summarily dismissed this claim as “rubbish” and “boring”.

Anyway, more than reminiscing about lacklustre dessert in Yorkshire in the nineties, I want to talk about happiness.

Because, as far as I can tell, there are two types of happiness. There is the happiness of gaining, and the happiness of doing. The gaining happiness, which you feel when you succeed, when you win, when you get a reward, is like the bun with the cherry on top. It’s the happiness of a notification pinging your phone to tell you that your recent Instagram post has new likes. The happiness of taking home a glamorous new outfit from town. The happiness of someone you find attractive paying you a compliment. Mmm. Succulent red cherry.

It’s a good feeling, this, and one intrinsically tied into our existence. We use this feeling to reinforce behaviours that offer the maximum potential for staying alive and securing the survival of our offspring and thus our species - eating, socialising, sex, novelty, competition.

But it’s only the cherry on top of life. Sometimes it’s there, sometimes it isn’t. Cherries can’t fill up a life. There aren’t enough of them. Orient yourself based solely on chasing cherries and you’re setting yourself up for terrible failure and sadness. You either don’t get the cherries, in which case everything was for naught, or you do, and that becomes your baseline, and next time you need a larger cherry, a brighter cherry, more cherries, to relight that pleasure of gaining.

Desire cannot be satiated. As creatures in the world we want. It is part of who we are. If you get what you want then next day you want more. Every day of your life you will want. Accept this. Extinguishing desire isn’t happiness, it is anhedonia, depression.

But there is another kind of happiness, the happiness of doing. This is the rest of the iced bun. You get it when there’s a cherry, but you get it without the cherry, as well. It’s the happiness of being absorbed in a process - designing tattoos, streamlining workflow in the office, writing a blog. It is the happiness of concentration, of flow, of trying at something, before the feedback that tells you whether or not you were successful.

And it is the happiness of awareness. Not just of doing but of being. The doing of being alive, which your body is doing all the time, and can be rested within in meditation, in simply paying attention to this moment now.

There’s always going to be a child inside you that grasps for a cherry, that grins when it gets it, sulks when it does not, frowns when it is gone. This rollercoaster of pleasure and pain is one we all must ride, as Ronan Keating so astutely observed.

But just remember the other type of happiness, as well. Simply by being alive we all get this gift of an iced bun every day. So find something on which you want to concentrate, and concentrate. Be it designing clothes, running a business, raising a family, sitting cross-legged in a park listening to the wide river of life flowing on.

Enjoy the cherries, when they come your way, but set yourself up so that you appreciate the bun with or without the cherry. Learn to ground your focus in that, and you'll see the cherry for what it is - a nice addition, but not the whole of the story, not even nearly.

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Music: That's That, by Cass McCombs.