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Recognising Joy
How I learned to recognise moments of happiness and not ruin them by holding on too tight
Many years ago I watched a strange and beautiful Japanese movie ‘After Life’ in which the characters were asked to choose one moment from their lives, one memory, that they could choose to relive forever after their death. Their ‘afterlife’ would consist of just this one crystalline image, something that they could recall with the utmost clarity, and nothing else for the rest of time.
This choice — which you can imagine was the hardest one most of them had ever made — was their task over the course of a week. They had to recall one moment of perfect happiness, which the team helping them would then recreate on film, before they could take it and move on to eternity.
After I saw this movie it stayed with me for the longest time, because you see I couldn’t imagine what that moment would be for me. I was relatively young when I saw the movie and hadn’t yet had my daughter, so had no idea what it might feel like to hold my own child. My relationship with my husband was good, but it had not had the best of starts and I had few happy romantic memories from first meeting him. I was close to my family, but we were also kind of dysfunctional, so a lot of my early memories were tinged with stuff that happened later, and so…
