The Happiest People on Earth
Our first preliminary shipment arrived recently, and as the delivery crew heaved six huge, heavy, sealed boxes into our building’s historically narrow elevator, I tried to strike up some non-shipment-related conversation with the team lead who was back to seeming annoyed and tightly wound. I was sympathetic, for I had been wrestling in that affective space myself that day too.
Earlier in the week, I had been assured in an email by someone in an office somewhere that I’d get a call 30 minutes before the crew arrived with the delivery. On delivery day, I planned my day to make sure I’d be ready, but I knew my margins would be tight. The kids and I ran errands, one of which involved addressing an earlier administrative problem that only entailed me hitting up against a new one. After we finally got it all sorted out, we started to make our way home. Feeling good about solving the problems and not having yet received a call, I felt confident that we had sufficient time to get home. We boarded the train.
That’s when my phone rang.
“We’re here. At your apartment, downstairs,” a man’s voice said. I sighed and prepared myself to have to push back hard and manage expectations.
“Ah, ok. I’m not there. I was supposed to get a call ahead of time. But I’m coming home from an errand and should be there soon.”
“Oh, no one told me I was supposed to call.”
“Well, I’m heading there now, but I’m not sure how long it will take me. It might be 30 minutes.” My estimate had no grounding in my sense of location or direction, only that I knew I was supposed to have a thirty-minute lead time, and I was not afraid to claim it.
“Thirty minutes?!” He was annoyed.
“I had been told I’d get a call thirty minutes in advance, so that’s the best I can do. I’m heading there now.” My Berlin muscles, my international border-crossing muscles, were beginning to kick in. I knew how to respectfully stand my ground. But I also figured that, like me, he might be on the short end of an administrative stick. It’s one thing to coordinate things by email; it’s another to be the person carrying out the coordinated action.
“All right then. See you soon.”
His concluding comment was graced with acceptance, not resigned aggression, which relieved me. I checked my maps app and realized that I had overestimated how much time it was going to take me to get back; I’d likely be standing in front of our building in about 12 - 15 minutes, tops, not 30. I wanted to be sure I offered him an olive branch too, and texted, “I should be there in 20 minutes.” Better to underpromise and overdeliver.
The crew was relieved to know that there was an elevator and started bringing up the boxes. The team lead was still rankled, but not specifically at me, more at the ordinary frustrations of his literally back-breaking work. The boxes were heavy, he wanted me to know; why did they pack the boxes so heavy? I shrugged. “All I know is my weight allowance and the legal limits to which they can be packed.” Facts land on each of us uniquely, and on this question, he was the one suffering under the weight of them.
In the main, the boxes held up. Only one serving dish had shattered beyond repair. That news hit my youngest hard, for whom very little of his world has stayed the same. In tears, he said, “But that’s the bowl that . . .” and then listed memories of food, all the culinary togetherness that the bowl once held. I was sympathetic, of course, yet sought to reframe how he interpreted the broken dish. “This is the kind of thing that’s easy to replace. Let’s practice remembering what we’ve enjoyed from this dish.”
Dishes break everywhere, not only in international moves. It’s not that the things themselves are insignificant; of course they are. But they become tools indwelled with memories by our participation with them. What indwells them, oddly, remains in us even when things themselves shatter. The memories have a nearly material quality to them, but the material is in us, and so we have to practice keeping the memories fresh and potent in embodied ways. Serving dishes can shatter, yet the memories and meaning can still remain. They remain in us, and we can keep them.
As we worked to deconstruct the boxes’ contents, I struck up some friendly small talk. “We’ve enjoyed living in your country very much so far. Everyone here is so nice!” Despite being annoyed and weighed down by my heavy boxes, he was gratified and agreed, “Yeah, that’s good to hear! People here are generally quite friendly.”
I replied, “Aren’t Danes supposed to be the happiest people on earth? Like, scientifically?”
He smiled somewhat ruefully, “Yeah, so they say, but really, some people are happier than others. Some people have it better than others.” I didn’t doubt it, for measurements at scale, no matter how officious or methodologically rigorous, cannot account for every human experience.
Still, in the main, there’s a palpable sense of calm and courtesy here, practiced widely and culturally, that is palpably absent elsewhere. The phenomenon, common among the Nordic countries but also elsewhere, has been studied, measured, and thus, in some ways, made less mysterious, but that still doesn’t make it any easier to replicate or duplicate. Denmark is famous for contributing to that research with its Happiness Institute and related museum, and entertaining personal explorations of the phenomenon too. What if one’s sense of happiness wasn’t dependent on the weather, accumulating more things, getting more money, or alleviating oneself of the burdens of relationships, work, or communal demands? How can a cloudy, rainy, and wintry-dark place with high taxes and costs still boast of a relative sense of happiness? What else might be going on? Many people have tried to explore and answer that question. It’s not something one can sell in a bottle. It’s not something one can sell.
As I signed the forms for the shipment, making sure we had accounted for that dear old serving dish now shattered, I noticed that the man had two tattoos inscribed across each of his forearms. One said “Work Hard,” and the other said “Play Hard.”
“Perhaps that what you need more of, for happiness?” I said, pointing to his “play” tattoo.
“Oh yeah, I don’t know.” He looked out from our front windows on the scenery outside. “You know, not everyone here lives like this. This apartment isn’t typical. Ordinary people don’t have this.” As flat and tone-deaf as I knew it sounded, I assured him I knew that, and told him that “we don’t even live like this; we are ordinary people where we are from.” I wondered privately if it could be a place where we might be happy.
I thanked him as the team left. Now it was time for me to get to work, trying to figure out the puzzle pieces again, playing house in yet another place on earth.