Happiness by Daniel Dale

At 7pm I thought I’d found Happiness.

The road I was on at 7pm was long. The same way waiting 5 mins for a bus was long or waiting for the school bell to go was long. Tracking Happiness had also seemed long in the same way.  

7pm could also be wrong. I don’t remember what time it was specifically, but I remember it was late afternoon crossing into evening and the sun had turned everything the deep orange that photographers wet themselves for. At that time of day, shadows seem to consciously pull away from you into the distance, like towering sculptures taped to the ground with their usual white marble spray painted black.

I had been looking for Happiness for around 2 hours, or roughly two feet of shadow on this particular day. The road started close to my house. It had been a dull day to begin with, clouds dominant in the sky, but in terms of photos it started off well. Almost immediately I came across eggs on the roof of a car. I imagine Happiness had forgotten the dozen free range eggs while taking the rest of the shopping into the house, leaving them perched on top of the car for me to find. I composed the picture in a simple way, meticulously, taking my time through the viewfinder. I never checked inside the carton and often wonder whether it was empty or simply full of rocks to keep it weighed down in case of wind. 

I left the eggs to exist alone for a bit longer while my mind wondered curiously about what the photo would look like. The camera I use for Happiness is daysgoneby 35mm film and everyone knows that when you take a picture with it, it never quite looks the same as real life. And that difference is a place I thought Happiness may exist. I can’t tell if Happiness is in the colour of the film or the very physical thing itself, but I’m positive Happiness exists there somewhere.

I once thought I’d caught ‘H’ hiding behind the colour orange in Paris. After taking the photo in Paris I poured over it endlessly for days along with the other frames from the same roll, but I couldn’t be sure. It really did feel like happiness though. Another time in Canada I thought I’d caught wind ‘H’ was hauled up in Niagara by the falls. Possibly fell on hard times, maybe hoping to earn an easy wage. The crazy over the top amusements that countered the natural waterfalls gave me a headache, along with the constant smell of sugar. Only a few photos came from that trip, but I was sure happiness had moved on well and truly before then.

The road I will eventually find myself on at maybe 7pm has a slow ascent. A gradually lifting hill that sweeps left and right, curving back toward itself close to the top but carrying upwards further. There is a cross junction half way up and if you could see it from above it would look like this: £

I often found traces of Happiness in shop windows. There was something in the way they were laid out that seemed more for the benefit of my camera than to sell me anything. I never bought anything along the way, but I took a lot of photos. My favourite said WASH but backwards, like this - HSAW

Image by Daniel Dale

Image by Daniel Dale

Happiness had been the one to show me this particular road, except I don’t think I’ve ever came across ‘H’ here since. There was a pub close to the bottom that I was told Happiness frequented for a while. ‘H’ wasn’t an all day drinking type, tended to have things to do early morning, but in the evenings it seemed common occurrence enough to worry. I trundled past stopping only briefly to snap a picture of a push chair of apples. The chair was lime green and had definitely belonged to Happiness in the past. I carried on. 

The ascent wasn’t difficult, but constant. I wondered what ‘H’ was up to, what was going on in their life that sometimes made them so hard to find. I’d spent a long time looking for small clues, tracking Happiness as they went. Just the week before I’d found a good 50 origami cranes just sat there on someone’s dashboard, made out of pay-and-display parking tickets, no less. Afterwards I read about the legend of folding 100 origami cranes. Crazy stuff, maybe crazy enough to work. That had also been a cloudy day and a good one for pictures. Another time I’d found a set of toothbrushes on my parents radiator. Can’t think why ‘H’ put them there, but then I was learning to accept the weird sense of humour in these ordinary occurrences.

After a while I started to see echoes of Happiness everywhere. Someone told me about the Baader-Meinhof phenomena - maybe I’d searched so hard I’d started seeing ‘H’ everywhere, like the number 23. Maybe I’d have to be put away soon and monitored. Maybe I’d just carry on searching for Happiness until then. 

The sun was casting that orange glow on the road, spaghettifying my shadow out toward the horizon of the road. I’d paused to take a drink. It was a refreshing cold drink on the brink of a very warm evening, I was quietly counting how many rolls of film I had left in my pocket. The sun dazzled off the metal water bottle, reflecting rainbows of colour into my eyes. The warmth on my back relaxed my shoulders pulling the weight of gravity through my body towards my feet, it was a comforting weight. I finished taking a drink and placed the bottle back into my bag, straightening up and stretching myself out. Just ahead of me, out the corner of my eye, I caught Happiness crossing the road. I waved, turned round, and heading back down the road. It was going to start getting dark soon anyway. 


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Written by Daniel Dale

Daniel Dale is not a writer in any sense but a photographer in some. This piece is in response to the ordinary and everyday happenings that happiness can entail if we are simply to look for it, as well as our constant search in the hope it might yield a more substantial proof of happiness further down the line. 

Dale recently published his photo book ‘A Field Guide to Happiness’ and is currently running an online project ‘www.whatishappiness.co.uk' which aims to collect public responses to individual happiness.