I’ve had an epiphany! The concept of “a happy place” is common. Where is your happy place? Some people love the beach while others love mountain cabins. Ultimately, the environment that brings your blood pressure down is different for everyone. I’ve written many times on this website about how I didn’t believe that my happy place was a place at all, but rather, an experience.
When someone elevates simple ingredients to an art and treats the culinary arts as every bit as important as visual arts, that is my happy place. Monet creating a garden-scape painting or Barishnikov dancing a pas de deux are art. However, so is the unique twist on Eggs Benedict that one can order at The Library in St. Petersburg, Florida or the Croque Monsieur at Alpin Bistro in Gainesville, Florida. While this is still true, today I am going to make my first-ever amendment to my happy place philosophy.
“I stood staring out across the North Atlantic with the most powerful wind I’ve ever felt whipping at me, threatening to topple me over, and I started to cry. The landscape was part technicolor production and part black and white talkie. Irish grasses lying flat in the wind. Craggy gray rock and the not-so-very angry blue-gray sea surrounded me at every turn. This Florida girl allowed herself to revel in the deafening howl of the wind and to drink in the emerald green grass, the gray of the water, and the pure white of the caps on the ocean. I surrendered. I allowed myself to be awed by Mother Nature.”
You know who wrote that? Me. In 2013, I saw the Cliffs of Moher in Ireland and that was my reaction.
In fact, years ago, I read an article about the most beautiful walks anywhere in the world. On the list was the South West Coast Path in England. I don’t know why, but I put it on my travel bucket list. Recently, we had a long weekend available to us, so we spent a few nights in Cornwall, England. I walked up to the top of an insanely high cliff that overlooked a village, and I walked a tiny portion of the South West Coast Path and I cried a little.
My first field trip to explore my new homeland after moving to England was a weekend road trip across the border to Wales. In Conwy, I climbed to the top of the highest tower at the ruins of Conwy Castle. When I saw the fishing boats bobbing up and down in the water on one side, the rolling green hills dotted with puffy, white, grazing sheep on the other side, and felt the lichen-covered ancient stone under my fingertips, again I cried.
Tears are welling up now as I type this. Readers, I think I’ve found my happy place. Cliffs, rocks, and an ocean view (preferably with some green) might just be my happy place. Let me be clear, when I think of going to the beach, I think of staring at flat sand while being dirty and hot. That is most definitely NOT my happy place. For me, it is about the juxtaposition of stone and water, green and blue, peaceful and powerful.
Extraordinarily, it’s taken me 18 years of traveling to finally recognize the pattern. Don’t assume that just because you are from the tropics that the beach is your happy place and don’t assume because you’re from North Carolina that the mountains are your happy place. Explore this world of ours and discover what truly makes your heart happy. In the next installment of this website, I’ll show you Cornwall, England in what I hope you will feel is an intimate and personal way. . . beyond the guidebooks.
August 18, 2023 at 6:42 am
Love this!
August 18, 2023 at 10:55 am
Thanks! Three cheers for happy places! They make life richer, don’t they?
August 18, 2023 at 7:21 am
My happy place is waterfalls. I will sit for forever and just listen and watch.
August 18, 2023 at 10:53 am
Oooh, yes. I do like the sound of that. Glad to hear that you’ve found a happy place too! I’m learning that there is more than one way to like water. It doesn’t always have to be a beach in the traditional sense.