There was a knock at the door, and she put down the book and crossed the small bedroom of the little flat she’d bought when she first moved to Stoke-on-Trent. It was on the sixth floor of a modern building on a quiet back street, not far from the old pot banks that stood to the south of Hanley. Harri’s one-bedroom home might have been small, but the big windows in the living room gave her a panoramic view of the city and the emerald countryside beyond. It used to inspire her, but she didn’t even glance at it now.
‘Who is it?’ she asked, pressing her eye to the spyhole.
‘Me,’ Sabih Khan said.
He was in a tailored suit which clung to his wiry frame, and his hair was as immaculately coiffed as ever, the black waves shining with product.
Harri opened the door for her old partner.
‘All right?’ he said, lingering on the threshold. ‘I thought I’d stop by to see how you’re doing.’
‘Did Powell send you?’ Harri asked, sensing Sabih’s reticence.
‘No,’ he replied indignantly. ‘I’m here because—’
She cut him off. ‘Because you care?’
‘You know, people ask if I miss you, but right now I can’t say that I do.’
‘Well, you know the way out.’
‘I will come in, thank you,’ he said, pushing his way past Harri.
She shut the door and followed him through the open-plan kitchen diner to the living room, and she flushed as she suddenly saw her home through a newcomer’s eyes. It was a battlefield of misery and the casualties of her war with depression were scattered everywhere: clothes, magazines, unopened post, half-consumed cups of coffee, crumb-covered plates – some relatively recent, others relics from weeks ago. She hadn’t felt this low since her relationship with Ben had ended. Harri registered the look on Sabih’s face.
‘I know what it looks like,’ she said. ‘But these aren’t telltale signs. I’ve just been busy.’
‘Empty bottles, discarded food, unkempt appearance,’ Sabih responded, and Harri’s hand rose instinctively to straighten her hair. ‘None of these are signs of depression. Is that what you’re telling me?’
He held her gaze, and they stood in silence as she eyed him defiantly.
‘I was just passing,’ he said at last. ‘I’m not here to intrude on your business. If you say you’re fine . . .’ he trailed off. ‘But if you need help—’
‘Listen,’ she interrupted. ‘You can tell Powell, or anyone else who wants to know, that I’m doing brilliantly and winning at life.’
‘I’m sorry, Harri,’ Sabih said. ‘I let you down. I never thought Powell would go for you like that. I don’t know what to say. I wish I could take it back. Do better. Be stronger.’
And just like that he took the angry wind of indignation out of her sails. Harri couldn’t cope with kindness. Not today. She nodded, not trusting herself to reply. She’d thought about that night so many times, and wondered what she could have done differently. Her partner, her friend, was being beaten to death. If she hadn’t stepped in to save him, well, he wouldn’t be here. In her self-righteous self-pity she’d forgotten his suffering.
‘How are you?’ she asked. ‘The ribs?’
‘OK. Still hurts to breathe, and I don’t think I’ll be setting any track and field records for a while. The body heals. It’s the mind that’s harder, right? Do I still have what it takes? Will I be the first in next time, or a step behind everyone else?’
She could only imagine how his confidence had been knocked. Her own was shot.
‘You’ll be the classic fool rushing in,’ she remarked.
He didn’t look reassured. ‘What about you?’ he asked. ‘How are you doing? Really?’
‘I’ve been better. Some guy wasted an hour of my life today. Emailed me claiming he knew something about the footage of that night. Said I’d get it if I came to meet him in Nantwich. Never showed. I emailed him, giving a few choice thoughts on him wasting my time, but it’s probably some troll with a fake account.’
‘Harami,’ Sabih said. ‘Powell should have done more to keep your name out of the papers.’
Harri nodded. She’d devoted her life to the police, but none of that had mattered and her boss had hung her out for the vultures.
Sabih’s phone rang and he pulled it from his pocket.
‘Sorry, it’s the guv’nor,’ he said. He answered the call. ‘Go ahead, guv.’ There was a brief pause and Harri imagined Powell rattling off an instruction. ‘I’m on my way.’
He hung up and gave Harri an apologetic puppy-dog shrug. ‘Sorry. Duty calls.’
Harri felt a pang of envy. A few weeks ago, she would have been going with him.
‘Ah, that was insensitive of me. Great body, sharp mind, not so hot on all these complicated human things,’ he said, his index finger shuttling back and forth through the air between them.
Harri suddenly felt sorry for him. He’d been beaten and battered physically and psychologically, and he was grieving too. He’d lost a partner.
‘Complicated human things?’ Harri replied. ‘What are you, a robot? Just say, “Let’s grab a beer sometime”, and leave with a smile on your face.’
‘Let’s grab a beer sometime,’ Sabih said as he backed towards the door. ‘You’re the best, Harri. A top girl.’
She couldn’t resist a smile at his awkwardness.
After he was gone, Harri stood in the little flat for a moment, listening to the distant sounds of the city, where thousands of lives far more productive than hers were being played out. She glanced around the messy room and thought about tidying up, but the brief surge of energy that had risen in Sabih’s presence soon dissipated. The mess could wait. She left everything as it was, and returned to her book.
Extract from Happiness: A New Way of Life
By Isabella Tosetti
Printed with permission of Vitalife Press
Happiness as Love
Romeo and Juliet. Star-crossed lovers, ill-fated to suffer. A picture of love that’s endured to this day. One of pain and sacrifice. Love as tragedy. Alongside this runs a steady stream of novels, television, film and song that tell us love is the most powerful source of happiness.
Death cannot stop true love.
You had me at hello.
You complete me.
And so on.
The world’s libraries could be filled with nothing but books on love, and still the poets would think more needed to be said.
Dr Martha McClintock demonstrated what we perceive as falling in love is actually a sense of attraction manufactured by our brain because it has used a combination of visual and olfactory stimuli to gauge that union with the man or woman in question would produce offspring with optimized immune systems. Less star-crossed love, more evolutionary biology. This is true even of same-sex relationships, because the matching of immune systems is blind to prejudice and untroubled by concepts of gender.
We’ve all heard friends say, ‘I don’t know what she sees in him,’ or, ‘He loses his mind when he’s around her.’
The obsessive, infatuated lover is a staple of romantic poetry. In addition to manufacturing a powerful sense of attraction to help with evolutionary optimization, our brains increase the chances of mating by shutting down the regions of our brain associated with critical reasoning. Semir Zeki and his colleague John Paul Romaya found that people deeply in love experience temporary and specific loss of brain function whenever they think about their lover. Using brain-imaging techniques, Zeki and Romaya measured a significant deactivation of the frontal cortex. If we could see a person’s faults, we’d be less likely to mate with them, so our brains quite literally blind us with love.
Eventually the hormone rush wears off and the brain stops its tricks. Some people wake up one day and wonder what they ever saw in the person lying next to them. Others stay together, and blind love, that evolutionary trap, turns into something else, something profoundly real.
Love can make you blind. It can give you fleeting brain damage, it can cause pain, anguish, and suffering. But when all that is gone, you’re left with someone whose life you share. You hope you make each other better. You share experiences. You sacrifice, but each sacrifice must be repaid, or else there is imbalance and exploitation. The most powerful relationship (and always remember why I use the word powerful) is the one that is harmonious. A healthy relationship strikes a note of truth and brings equilibrium to the lives of the lovers. It is through that truth and balance that we find happiness, because without being true to ourselves and those around us, we manufacture an illusory self, and a gap is created between who we really are and who we’re pretending to be. If there is no harmony in the relationship, that gap is likely to grow, and it is this gap between the true self and the projection we manifest into the world that is the source of so much unhappiness.
Love should create no gap. It should not force you to manifest any illusion about who you really are. Love that is worthy of the word will be real and true. It will provide fuel for your generator. In ordinary times, love should heal you. It should bring you happiness. If you find yourself in extraordinary circumstances and your world requires sacrifice, make sure it brings you harmony, and through whatever it is you do for the one you love, you must ultimately find balance and that all-important power. A love that helps you be true to who you really are is the most powerful love of all.
Happiness as Novelty
Misery is comfortable. It becomes familiar and if we grow accustomed to it, we seek it out. How many times in life have you thought, Not again? How many times have you felt yourself making the same mistake? The same bad lover, the same awful job, the same terrible friendship.
We’re creatures of habit, and once we establish a pattern for ourselves, it’s difficult to break. Whether it’s nature or nurture, we’re malleable creatures, programmable, designed to adapt to our surroundings, and if we come to have certain expectations in life, we will subconsciously ensure they are met. The bad lover will become an archetype we seek out. When the relationship inevitably deteriorates and finally breaks down, it will reinforce whatever feelings of self-loathing led us into his or her arms and reduce our self-esteem to make us even more likely to accept another inferior scoundrel.
The same goes for jobs and friendships, and pretty much every aspect of our lives.
So what can we do?
If you find yourself falling into an unhealthy pattern, don’t wallow in the comfort of the familiar. Challenge yourself to break it. Do something different. Reflect on what is leading you into a cycle of repetition, of recurrence, trapping you into making the same mistake. The same play rehearsed over and over again with slightly different lines and an altered cast of actors.
If depression puts you in bed, ignore its heavy grip and force yourself to go for a walk. I have talked about the nourishing qualities of trees and the power of forest bathing and have no doubt you’ll benefit from the phytoncides mentioned on page 286, but a walk will also broaden your world rather than shrink it. Change and optimism are hardest to deliver when we’re low, but that’s precisely when we need to be able to realize them. Don’t wallow. Get up. Get up and get out. You want a different result? Get out there and do something different to get it.
The Gap
Why aren’t you happy? Because you don’t have the woman you want? Or the man? The job? The house? The car? Have you lost someone you love?
It is far easier for us to pinpoint the sources of unhappiness than it is to explain why we’re happy. Does happiness even exist? Can you laugh during the bleakest moments? Of course. But would you describe yourself as happy? And when you are at your most contented, would you describe yourself as happy in the common meaning of the word? Or are you simply at peace? Free of desire, untroubled by longing.
We often mistake happiness for elation, and are encouraged to nurture the gaps in our lives by companies that will profit from desire. They lead us to believe transitory, endorphin-based elation is the happiness we need, but the quest for elation only creates an addiction that can never be satisfied.
Contentment is elusive and can be hard to realize. It’s much easier to believe a new car will make us happy. Or a new house. Or a new relationship.
Happiness comes from within. You’ve heard that one, right? But it doesn’t come from within. It is the within. If you let go of desire and regret (for what is regret but the desire to undo the past?), you will realize you have everything you need. There is no gap in your life. Once you accept that reality, you can find peace, contentment and a happiness more profound and lasting than anything you’ve ever experienced. End the quest for transient elation. Unlock the happiness within.
I want.
The words were scrawled in the margin in red ink. Harri noticed a couple of scribbles above them where it looked as though someone had tried to get a pen to work. She was a little annoyed to be reminded it was a used book and that someone else had read it before her. She’d been lost in Isabella Tosetti’s words, and the knowledge another reader had got them first seemed to somehow diminish their significance. They’d been striking a chord with her, particularly the section about being love-struck. That’s certainly how she’d felt the first time she’d met Ben. She absently turned the page and felt a sudden chill when she registered the handwritten words in the margin overleaf.
I want to live
Help
He’s trying to kill me