crisp

'Hi, how are you?'
'Yeah, good, how's it going?'
'Well thanks.'
'Good.'

A pretty ordinary exchange, codified and nearly meaningless. We've said it to people we don't know, people we don't like, people we know aren't well, and people who know we aren't well. But just now it was deeply satisfying. Before that I took a long-cut through the gardens along an un-mowed path. I stood on the edge of an artificial pond and watched the goldfish, hanging motionless in the flow of scummy bubbles from the inlet. At lunch my salad was speckled with nested drops of soy, lemon and oil. The two lowest strings of my guitar, plucked together, resonate on the edge of hearing with a deeper ghost note.

These things happen all the time, but today it seems sharper, closer, and - this sounds pretentious but for better or worse I'm not pretending - more meaningful. Nothing much has happened, there's still the usual to be done, but life is running more smoothly and at higher resolution.

A few years ago I was on a walk with my family, just talking and looking around. We tried to work out why it was so pleasurable. Our conclusion: because we had realized we were happy. We've so many needs to be satisfied daily, so perhaps the key is to be able to stop and recognize when everything is, well, alright.