It was just a room, one so narrow that I couldn't see how even a single bed would leave room for a cupboard and shelves. When I arrived there as a young teenager in the mid 1960s it moved from sunroom to bedroom, and some time after that it became more than a bedroom.
Just as the bedroom became for so many other teenagers, my bedroom became my retreat from a difficult world, a place of shelter from a world I believed didn't much like me, a place where everyone wasn't watching me. Using a description coined much more recently, it was my happy place.
But when I tried to describe its special history to my wife as we prepared my mother's house for sale, it was just a room too narrow to be of much use. So strong had been its protections that I half expected to feel that presence again as I bid it farewell but there was nothing, nothing but a uselessly narrow space.
I guess happy places don't live forever.
Instead, we create or find new happy places, and as I've been identifying those lately I've come to realise that the times in my life when I had no happy space were the most stressful. When, for example, I was a single and footloose young fellow I had a good time but there was an undercurrent of stress, and as I moved about the world I had nothing I see now as a happy place.
Perhaps there was stress because there was no happy place. I do believe that travel, especially in countries with a language you don't speak, is much more stressful than most people realise, and a happy place in a backpack would help.
At other times of stress I have found a happy place especially useful, and one in particular had a powerful influence on my prognosis during cancer treatment 15 years ago. The radiation was taking a heavy toll, and two or three times a week I'd feel the need to sit on a stool at a window of The Exchange Hotel in Hamilton with a middy of beer.
The middy of beer is the strange bit. I couldn't drink it, not even a sip, and I couldn't talk to anyone and didn't want to, but the half hour at that window with the beer had a powerfully positive influence on the most important assessment of my chances of survival, and that was not my doctors' assessment but my own.
A stool at a pub window is still one of my happy places but only in pubs I find attractive, which are definitely not those of modern design. Doesn't take long to shed the toxins of a few days, one beer if I'm driving and two if I'm not, and favourite pub windows are at The Tea Gardens Hotel, The Middle Pub at Mullumbimby and The Pacific Hotel at Yamba.
I suspect that a happy place for many women is a hairdressing salon.
Another happy place for me is under a tree, any tree so long as it's leafy and shady, and my toddler grandson seems to have the same predilection. He insists every time we return from up the backyard that we sit for a few minutes on the bench under the mango tree. We just sit, then we go inside recharged.
A happy place need not be a physical place.
Over the many years I worked in an office I came to realise that for some people a mug of coffee or whatever seemed to transport them. They'd clutch the mug and as easily as that they were not at work but in a room full of people eager to hear all their family news and car dramas and holiday plans.
For some the happy place is patting a dog or a cat, and I have seen the instant delight in frail, elderly people on seeing a dog or a cat. Such an everyday thing for many people yet the impact is clear in those who've been deprived of that everyday interaction.
Small children have the same effect, and the sight of one of my small grandchildren visiting his great grandmother in aged care brings joy to many of the guests, especially the women. Suddenly they're in a happier place and I always hope it lasts longer than our passing by.
A happy place can be, too, a sensation, and I know that being barefoot puts me into a different mode. I don't know why having my feet in direct contact with the ground would change the things I think about, and even the way I think, but it does. Perhaps it is that my mind associates bare feet with holidays but I think it is more than that. Nudists describe a similar change.
Spring, in half-hour windows, is for me a happy place. It is a new warmth, an expectancy, renewal, something indefinable but nonetheless real, and it envelops me only when I'm outdoors and only in the first few weeks of spring.
Others among my happy places are cooking fires, as in a campfire, heading north to anywhere so long as it's north, and undeveloped shores of saltwater estuaries. When I'm there I am very likely to be happy, and the effect lingers.
Happy place is a place in the mind, and the closest I can get to explaining it is as an emotional association. That's not close enough but let's not worry about it. I hope you're in your happy place more often than usual this year.
I've come to realise that the times in my life when I had no happy space were the most stressful. When, for example, I was a single and footloose young fellow I had a good time but there was an undercurrent of stress, and as I moved about the world I had nothing I see now as a happy place.
jeffcorb@gmail.com
