In 1990, I was in grad school still, with life still a virtually open road before me. That’s the year Stanley and Iris came out, a film about two people in difficult circumstances who meet, help each other, fall in love, and live happily ever after. Stanley is smart and talented, but he’s functionally illiterate, a condition he must hide to keep a job and avoid the ridicule of his fellows. He has withdrawn from people for fear they will discover his secret. Stanley is only in his 40s, but hardly young at heart. Instead, he is cowed and ashamed, with no bounce in his step or hope in his heart. Avoiding trouble is his goal.
In contrast, Iris is young at heart, with a desire to live and enjoy. Her dream, she tells Stanley, is room service for a day in a bustling Boston hotel. The joy, the comfort, the luxury! She practically laughs out loud, tilting her head back where the two of them sit together on a park bench. She must be imagining something really fine.
Stanley then tells her about a time he went to the Grand Canyon. He walked down to the bottom and stayed there for six days and nights. He slept in a bedroll. He saw no one and spoke to no one. It was the best time he ever had.
Iris replies, “Six days? It would drive me crazy.”
Stanley continues. “You don’t have to fight for anything or explain anything or dodge anything. You just feed the deer and watch the sun go down.”
That, in a nutshell, is peace for him: no one asking anything of him. No expectations.
I thought of a friend of mine, someone very different from Stanley, a guy who doesn’t seem to fret about anything or have any regrets, someone with peace of mind. His contentment, he says, comes from having no expectations. It makes sense: no expectations, so no disappointment. Anything can be a source of happiness. This doesn’t mean nothing is unpleasant or difficult for him. It means, I think, that he doesn’t ever gnash his teeth, ask Why oh why? or kick himself. He doesn’t torture himself or anyone else by thinking of the way it’s supposed to be.
His life has had its great sadnesses. A love affair ended after about a dozen years, not because love had frittered away but because love alone is not enough. He might think about that girlfriend, but he doesn’t regret her. Before that, after more than 20 years of happy marriage, he lost his wife to cancer. He had a 12-year-old son to raise alone. But he doesn’t dwell on his wife’s death either, or the difficult times while she was sick or after her death. It’s as if that all happened in a different life, he told me. I understood that his wife’s death in that life is no reason not to enjoy this life, now. A good book with a sad ending was over, and now he was in a good book that promised a happy ending.
So no self-recriminations, no guilt, no “if only” either. He doesn’t get angry; he just gets out of a situation when it isn’t to his liking. This is easy for him because he is as happy alone, doing his own thing, as he is in company, helping a friend. Enviably happy, I would say. His experience of the world is so contrary to Stanley’s experience that you think the two men might have absolutely nothing in common.
They do, though. They are both mechanically minded tinkerers. They both enjoy working on their own and don’t need constant encouragement or approval. Stanley turns out to be an inventor and my friend a fixer-upper, capable of all manner of restoration, from adding new rooms on a house to landscaping yards to rebuilding an engine. Stanley invents a cake-cooling machine; my friend fixes his gyrocopter. What need have they of an audience for their gadgets and inventions, their insights, their fixes? What need has a painter bent over the easel, coaxing into paint a surprising facet of the muse? The doing, the solving, the expressing—these would seem to be reward enough.
The Spanish say, Nunca es tarde si la dicha es buena, which means, It’s never too late if the outcome is good. “Never too late,” we might echo in English, but with the emphasis on timing (you still have time!) not outcome (it’s going to be worth it). Or we might say, “All’s well that ends well,” emphasizing the goal, not the journey. Stanley learns to read and write and is a successful businessman in the end, so all the suffering and uncertainty that came before is only—well, what is it?
It is the price we pay for a happy ending. And perhaps the happier the ending, the more it was worth.
I thought of another friend, a former boyfriend. His mother taught him that muchos pocos are better than pocos muchos—many small goods trump a few big ones. Be happier sooner and for longer with modest pleasures.
Which advice would I have offered Stanley, or anyone else in difficulties? Nunca es tarde or muchos pocos? For Stanley, learning to read and write was a trial. He grew frustrated and became fed up with his slow progress. I think most people are like that: impatient, more with themselves than with others. If only they could expect less. But unlike my friend, most people can’t. So if ambition, shame, or solitude keeps you from happiness, then yes, go seek what you need. It’s not too late to reshape a crooked life, to fix a flat, to straighten a warped wheel. Why, it’s never even too late to throw out the warped wheel and get a new one, to wipe the slate clean and start over.
Though it’s also perfectly fine to continue as before—to ride around on a bike with a warped wheel, to use a smudged slate. In graduate school an instructor asked us all where we’d like to be in 15 years. My answer was at a desk, writing, with a cat on my lap. It’s way past the year 2005, but here I am still, with a cat on my lap as I write. I got what I’d imagined I wanted. Actually, I got a lot more: I got everything else that goes with this particular cat and this particular piece of writing. Dare I say I got it all?
Not quite, not yet. Not until I’m able to give it all up, and still do as my friend of few expectations seems so able to do. He wouldn’t find a smudged slate a problem. He’d wonder why you’d expect a used slate to look like a clean one. Then he’d shrug, put on his glasses, roll up his sleeves, and get to work on another interesting project.
