Where The Wild Strawberries Grow and Printers Are Never Broken
“Perfect” is a difficult character. It either doesn’t exist, is found everywhere, is unachievable, a villainous killer of sorts or is something we tell 5-year-olds that we all already are. When I was five years old, I learned that noun is a “person, place, thing, or idea.” Perfect ideas have certainly gotten us into enough trouble. Communism, Utopias, Subprime Mortgages. Fun times. Searching for perfect people is why we call hopeless romantics hopeless. It’s also why we have online dating. And divorces. Perfect things are too easily tarnished. We’ve all been around a hipster who scuffed his 200 dollar white sneakers for the first time. The world steps all over my blue suede fantasies. I know the world is far from perfect - there are enough wars, natural disasters, and empty milk cartons I’ve found in the fridge JUST when I’m craving cereal to remind me of that. But, I haven’t yet given up on the idea of perfect places.
The gardens of Buddhist temples and French Palaces both take an incredible amount of meticulous maintenance. And so do perfect places. I suppose not so much in the whole tidying, vacuuming, and dusting sense. After hours of dedicated research that I soon plan to publish in the Journal of “I Was Totally Supposed To Doing Work At That Time,” I can conclude that, although necessary, those tasks somehow don’t get much more fun with the addition of either loudly belting Cinderella songs or dragging out a “Sexy French Maid” costume. In any case, maintaining “Perfect Places” doesn’t require a Swiffer. Unfortunately, it requires something impossible - moments of guaranteed joy.
Imagine it - it certainly wouldn’t work if you were skipping with jolly childish enthusiasm (okay, more likely just walking, but it’s a nice image) down your favourite street, and picked up your phone to read an email informing you that you might lose your job. Or to find out that a stock collapsed. Or that your Grandmother died. Or to read “We should see other people.” Or that your favourite coffee shop is going to start charging for wifi.
Well, insert your favourite “four letter word” here. Care for a duck with a side of typo? Is the street ruined now? Like spilling a nine-dollar bottle of freaking “Beets and Greens” juice all over the goddamn carpet?
See that just sounds too risky. Too high maintenance, too dangerous. Too insecure with too much instability. Like everything you don’t want in a girlfriend. But, it’s also just as unavoidable, right? It’s not as if you can shield yourself temporarily from bad news, feeling depressed, getting crippling injuries or having one of those “Mystery New York City Drops” land on your shoulder and make you shudder before ban yourself from thinking about what on earth that could be. (On a side note - think of it like one of those luck-granting “Cave Kisses”...with just a little added pigeon poop.) I’d do anything to keep my favourite places magical and untarnished, but I can’t exactly pop open an umbrella against the “Life Sucks” Factor every time I turn that street corner or hop that fence. I mean, imagine what it’d take- places where you would only go if you knew you were about to smile or about to laugh? About to meet that Mysterious Stranger and fall in love? About to be reassured that there are indeed wonderful things and magical moments in this world of failed economic utopias and cracked phone screens and screwed up Starbucks orders? It sounds naive. Undoable. The sort of thing you’d patiently listen to a kid describe for about five minutes and wrap it up with a quick: “That’s a nice idea Jamie, now eat your applesauce.”
So I guess what we’ve learned here is that I’m either a really tall rambling five year old or that my theory is a complete flop.
I can handle it.
I’m sure my mom would love to restate that first bit the next time I throw a Printer-Tantrum.
And I’ve definitely heard the second part after applications of my “Maybe If I Never Open The Scary Email It’ll Just Go Away” theory have failed repeatedly.
But, hear me out.
The problem is, one can’t pursue happiness directly, as if joy is some magical state where everyone is happy all the time and there’s always enough milk for your cereal. Last time I checked, there were still only 50 states on the US flag, more than half of which have obesity epidemics, and apparently even avocado shortages thanks to hipsters that like toast too much. You can’t type “Happiness” into google maps and expect to be given clear directions in a monotone voice with a British accent: “In three quarters of a smile, turn left”. To prevent fraud, or to provide evidence of it, cartographers put fake streets and towns onto maps. As much as I hate, it, my least favourite phrase after “This Train Is Out Of Service” applies here: “It doesn’t work like that.”
Pure Happiness Boulevard only exists in religious conversion pamphlets and in our imaginations - as far as goal destinations go, it’s quite useless. You can’t plan to be happy to make a place perfect.
If you’re aiming to get to happiness, you won’t be able to see it in the distance. But, the first great explorers couldn’t see beyond the horizon any better than I can. They just did everything they could to keep moving forward - you can’t set out for the horizon without losing sight of the shore after all. You can’t plan a trip to Happiness Island - we all know that sounds like either a third-rate Arcade or a really tacky strip club. But, you can plan to do things that just might increase your odds of winning a free cruise to the closest real equivalent to Happiness Island. And we all know it’s possible to win free cruises. We can find the perfect place to listen to our favourite song. The perfect place to run like the wind. The perfect place to kiss. The perfect place to listen to Communistic marches or German death metal or Legal Studies audiobooks - whatever you’re into.
Park Rangers say to take only memories and leave only footprints. There aren’t perfect worlds or perfect people or perfect places or perfect things. But there are perfect memories. They’re rare, but they can be found if you look closely. Like wild strawberries. There’s a world in Swedish - “Smultronstället.” Literally, it means "The wild strawberry patch,” but it idiomatically signifies “an underrated gem of a place, often with personal or sentimental value.” I have a lip gloss called Strawberry Bliss, after all. So let the traces of your footprints, your non-infuriating cursor trail, lead you to find the patches where grow your own wild strawberries- your blissful, perfect, memories.
We can’t guard ourselves or our favourite people or our favourite places from the unexpected. Like we said before - we can’t shield ourselves from heartbreaking news or annoying emails or from text-message breakups (Although, seriously? Babushka would be disappointed.) We can’t wave an LED-included wand and make a place our little Utopia or some optimistic haven where nothing bad ever happens and no one ever hurts us and papercuts don’t hurt more than they should and “shhh mommy’s gonna fix it.” We can’t make these locations our “Harmless Places” - that’s impossible. But we can make them our “Fearless Places.” The beautiful places where we can pause for a moment and look up and realize that we CAN open that email, or that bank statement, or make that phone call, ask that question, handle a loss or actually break a leg. The places that remind you that you can be like Tide and handle it when life gets messy. That you can, somehow, figure it or and make it work. Where there’s a wish and there’s a will, there’s a way - right? Some people say they’ve got an outfit equivalent to a superhero’s cape and overly-tight unitard. I guess I’m proposing places that make you feel like superman. And, I guess that’s close enough to “Perfect” for me.
