Lighted Windows

On a deep summer night in Minneapolis, I walked around the streets with my youngest sister Ann on some errand. The cut grass smelled strongly in the hot, humid night, the street lamps illuminated circles along the way and it was late enough in the year that crickets had begun their musical chirping. I had just spent several weeks at our lake in Minnesota with my Mother, Ann and her husband. My own husband had stayed home to take care of our dog. As I walked around, I looked up at the buildings full of apartments. “Lighted windows,” I said to Ann, pointing as I told her how they affected me.

For many years, intermittent despair had plagued me over my marriage. No matter how successful I was, with good jobs of increasing income and responsibility, even enough to buy a house in a Bay Area suburb, nothing made my then husband happy. He could not find work or a place for himself that satisfied him. He continued to medicate himself with drugs and alcohol. The addiction insisted that he make chaos around him, often involving me, thus justifying his need for a drink! AA has found ways to understand, and then conquer this pattern, but in my husband’s case, it simply didn’t work.

When I passed houses or apartments where light shone from the windows, I imagined happy and contented people lived in them. Somewhere, I reasoned, people were making something of their one precious life and sharing it with their families. In Minnesota I recuperated from the daily slings and arrows of my home life. I even began to think that someday I would be happy, that my lighted window would someday cheer someone else who needed it. Pain could not go on forever.

In fact it did not. That winter, fear of the constant destruction and anger at the waste of our substance compelled me to finally leave my husband for good. Relief was instant, though it took a while to dig myself out of that hole. After ten years I married again, gaining the family I had so desired, in which loss was not constant and what I did mattered.

Interconnected as we are, whatever we do affects everyone around us. If we are not trying in some way to better our habits and our abilities, or have not at least grabbed the evolutionary ratchet that holds us in place, those we live and work with will surely notice and relax their own efforts. Entropy is the way of the world, but it is checked by the manifest work of the natural world as well as our own. As they say, you can’t always count on the worst thing happening. The earth owes its abundance and beauty to a complex system of order and chaos of which we humans are a part. 

According to E. O. Wilson, humans are among the few eusocial species in the world,  defined by cooperative care of the young and overlapping generations. Some of us have no children of our own, but altruistically help care for other people’s. “Social evolution was the key to the evolution of our line,” says Wilson. It has helped us to become so numerous on the earth.

In addition, researchers now believe there are only four basic human emotions: joy (the active expression of happiness), fear, anger and sadness. There cannot be too much joy in the world.  It seems that it is our duty to spark joy in each other. Anyone who thwarts the natural joy with which a child greets the day is committing a crime for which he or she will have to answer. This doesn’t mean we should forgo discipline and responsibility. They bring meaning to a life, and children can find joy in them, just as the rest of us do.

“But how can I find joy in my life when there are so many who are suffering?” When Bishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa, a man who had known a great deal of both, was asked this question at age 84, he suggested that the person start where they were, take up a project and work on it. Then he said, “it helps no one if you sacrifice your joy because others are suffering. We people who care must be attractive, must be filled with joy, so that others recognize that caring, that helping and being generous are not a burden. They are a joy. Give the world your love, your service, your healing, but you can also give it your joy. This too is a great gift.” The Book of Joy [2016].

Joy is the light in our eyes, the smiles on our faces, the delight in living we share with all we pass, those we know and those we don’t. When we first moved to Los Angeles, I enjoyed the ease with which strangers talked to each other. Two of us waiting for a train might start talking, or I would share the view of the moon coming up behind the mountain in the twilight with my seat mate. All too quickly we started wearing masks and avoiding each other due to the world-wide pandemic.

But you can see the joy in someone’s eyes on occasion. Yesterday we had lunch at a Shandong restaurant in Monterey Park, just east of us. Shandong is a northern province of China where the food is more based on wheat than rice. I could see apprehension on the face of the proprietor when we entered. “Oh, oh, laowai (foreigners)!” He was probably worried he wouldn’t be able to communicate with us. In Monterey Park people may do business entirely in Chinese.

The paper menu was in English, however, and all we had to do was mark the dishes we wanted. Don and I are well-versed in Chinese food and the etiquette required is universal. We managed the whole luncheon with nary a word passing between us and the family who ran the place. In addition I was treated to the joy with which the food was served, particularly when the proprietor brought out a dish of buns filled with pork, leeks and parsley fried a golden brown. His eyes told me he was proud and we were in for some good eating. Our “xie xie” (thank you) as we left the restaurant was loud and confident.

I now look at the lighted windows of apartments with less longing. I appreciate the joy people bring to their lives, in the way they walk, in their eyes and almost immediately in what they have to say. Why not? We share space with each other. Why not make it nice?