SNOW! And Life's Pleasures

So today I walked back from my job interview. In the snow. It was beautiful and probably one of my happiest moments in the last week.

No, I don't know yet if I got the job.

check out this crazy snowman!

Yeah, my toes were a bit cold, and my fingers and nose too, but it sure beat sitting around at home. Everything was beautiful, and I was enjoying it so much, in fact, that when I got home I decided to go walk around the park because I wasn't ready to be inside yet. There were too many awesome things to see.

Rose hips

There was a family sledding down the tiny little hill in the park... the happy squeals made everything twice as cheerful. It reminded me of the old Lionel Barrymore recording of "A Christmas Carol" that my mom plays every Christmas Eve... the part where Scrooge wakes up on Christmas morning and goes to stroll around town in the snow, greeting his neighbors. "He had never imagined that any walk, that anything, could give him so much happiness."

In a world where happiness seems so elusive, isn't it great that sometimes we can get so much pleasure out of something as simple as walking in the snow, which takes no money, no fancy technology or anything like that? The greatest joys in life are out there for us to grasp if we can open our hearts and our eyes a little. The world is beautiful. People, animals, plants, the forces of nature, the stars in the sky. Science. Art. After spending a morning talking with the daycare director about how children love to explore everything, I know that deep down we all want to keep being amazed at this world and this life God gave us. All the little things. That doesn't mean that life isn't hard. Snow is cold and wet and people get sick in the winter and the clouds block out the sunlight and make us lethargic and traffic gets delayed and the list of woes goes on.

But that doesn't mean that the world is any less beautiful.

Excuse my squinting and pokey curl xD

To bring this full circle back to veganism, thinking of all of life's little pleasures reminded me of a conversation I had with a teacher at BYU Hawaii, when I was finishing up my big 20+ page paper on LDS values and Animal Rights. I don't remember all that was said, though I think most of it was positive... but near the end of the conversation my teacher said, in reference to giving up animal products:

"But life has so few pleasures already."

I didn't know what to say to him at the time (curse my tendency to become passive when I can't immediately think of the right response!) but later that day, and many times since then, I have thought to myself, "how sad." How sad first of all that people believe there are so few pleasures in life, when there are so many, even if at times they are hard to see. How sad that the irony of that statement was lost to both of us in that moment--the irony being that if there are few moments of pleasure for us human beings, we think it is justifiable to take away the even fewer pleasures and joys the animals in our charge might have, such as the joy of parenthood and other relationships, the joy of freedom, open air, and room to play, and most of all the joy of life itself. And as time has gone on, how sad it is that people believe that our pleasure in food will disappear if we decide to take a stand against cruelty. I can honestly say that the pleasure I take in food has tripled. I enjoy grocery shopping, cooking, and eating so much, not just because I love food, but because it gives me a wholesome feeling being constantly reminded of the peaceful world I am dreaming of and trying to live toward ("live toward"--I just coined a new phrase!). I feel peaceful, yes, and that is one of the most important aspects of true joy.

And joy is even better than pleasure, isn't it?