The Hanging Chair
Three hundred ninety eight, three hundred ninety nine, four hundred, finally! On the brown carpet floor in my bedroom, I sat with a broken piggy bank beside me and exactly four hundred dollars in change, a sea of copper and silver coins finally ready for spending. Fourteen year old me needed every penny.
Ever since I can remember, I have had an extreme fascination with happiness. I never fought with my parents so I could avoid unnecessary anger, I did well in school to avoid stress, and I prayed to God to deal with sadness. But now I had gotten the idea into my head that the key to happiness was a four hundred dollar hanging chair. My Mother was annoyed, to say the least, to find that her daughter seemed sucked into the 21st century love of materialism but she could not have been more wrong. I wanted so badly to spend hours suspended on our normally vacant front porch reading books, greeting unsuspecting neighbors, and just being alone so that I could somehow discover the secret to life that had so perplexed me.
This younger version of me observed adults and saw that they viewed life as a struggle where the answer to every hard question was just, “it’s complicated.” This didn’t make any sense to me because the more I simplified life, the more simply happy I became. I could fabricate simplicity and make it tangible. This chair, on this porch would be my state of calm despite the sea of chaos that was my freshman year in high school.
Luckily as I approached my more open minded father with every cent I had ever acquired, something changed in the way he looked at me. He didn’t seem to really understand this aspiration I was so determined to fill, but he softened anyway from a distant memory of his own adolescence.
Today I have a chair, a chair made out of pennies. Today I am sitting still, watching sun rays dance over the brick floor far below me. I can swing my long legs and they will not touch the ground. For a moment I am weightless; suspended in time, I am as light as the breeze that settles around me. This is my calm at the center of a perpetual storm, this is my escape. I am sane and I am safe knowing that I can live in a world where happiness really is as simple as a chair. Here I am alone but I am not afraid. This is where I grew up and learned the key to happiness. In this world I learned that sometimes the best way to see is to close your eyes and the only way to hear is to be quiet. I am comfortable sitting back and observing but I understand when it is time to get up and participate in the beauty of life.
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