Happiness is loving the quotidian

("yeah, now she's got really nuts")

I thought about this yesterday, on the subway platform, coming back home from a tiring but amusing day on duty. I was reading a 1-day old article about Chico Buarque's 60th birthday. In a great discussion proposed to find out why women love the guy, one of them answered that it's because of his way of making poetry of the most simple things, like "todo dia ela faz tudo sempre igual" ("every day she does everything the same way").

Then I thought exactly that: happiness is loving the quotidian. I thought of how we do not depend on vacations, on the dream travel, on the ideal partner nor on winning the lottery to be happy. The world would be an extremely unfair place if it were this way, if we couldn't be happy in the daily routine.

What we have every day is what we have and that's it. It's the woman that shakes you at 6 in the morning, the kiss with coffee or mint flavour. The alarm clock at 7:30, the delayed bus, the fights with photographers, the bad food in the common restaurant. But it's also the newspaper section going well, the cups of coffee in the middle of the afternoon and the beers in the middle of the week, the family chats in the evening in front of the TV, the amusements at working time, the free weekends, the friends.

Who can love all these things is happy, I'm pretty sure.

  -- Mariana Sant'Anna (or "Little Mary" for closer friends), June 21st, 2004 - translated by Du!!