If You Have Joy, You Have It All

 

By Mark Howell

 

Key West, a friend tells me, is a unicum. I didn’t know what that was so I looked it up. It means a “thing unique in its kind.”

 

 

As we celebrate July the Fourth along with the rest of the nation this week, it does seem that the rebels and mavericks and philosophers who created independence out of the revolution are uniquely the province of our little island.

 

 

We celebrate doubly here every year, of course, on July 4 for the victory of independence and on Conch Republic Days in April for the freedom to be different, to be eccentric, to be true, to be wild. We celebrate an independence atop an independence.

 

 

Freedom can, for an example, be the right to almost take a tumble from a bike while trying to avoid running over a library book dropped on Fleming Street the other day. (We brake for books). The freedom was in the coincidence of the bookmark, a slip of paper that happened to address the topic of liberation and its necessary counterweights of forethought and circumspection.

 

 

“Be patient,” proclaimed the text on this bit of paper. The words were those of Paramahansa Yogananda and this printed piece he called a para-gram. “It is not your passing thoughts or brilliant ideas or brilliant ideas so much as your plain everyday habits that control your life,” he wrote.

 

 

We were compelled to read on. “Intelligence is a mark of God; be careful, discreet and sensible. Live simply. Don’t get caught in the machine of the world — it is too exacting. By the time you get what you are seeking, your nerves are gone, the heart is damaged and the bones are aching. Learn the art of right living. If you have joy you have everything. So learn to be glad and contented. Laugh at the world! Have happiness NOW.”

 

 

The most fun freedom of all is the freedom to imagine. Remember the story of “The Chalk Garden,” that place where everything has spiraled into entropy, everybody is ground down by the same old rules until someone exceptional comes along. She’s the little orphan girl who arrives to show the other children how to live a vastly better life, one that had been veiled from them until this disposed lost soul, essentially free, entered their fixed society.

 

 

It is the wayward, the different, the unicums of the world who have the power to transform other people’s lives, through little miracles that take very little effort and that happen as if by magic.

 

 

An orphaned kid, dancing to her different drummer, can open the eyes of all those closed down by fear.

 

 

To us at Konk Life, Key West is that young child.

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