A moment for being full of beans

The following post is quite long and may be a bit all over the place. It is 90+ degrees and I tend to function best at 60. Regardless, this post has been a long time coming and I hope you will enjoy it. To anyone from McBride who reads this, the London story may not be exactly what you were hoping I would get out the trip, but I assure you I learned lots beyond this moment. However, I have left out other people’s names in case the story is less than kosher. Without further ado…

In October of last year, I have the opportunity to go to London on a class trip. well all of the planned outings and events were lovely, I find myself thinking of one and since it's sprung up out of nowhere for remains one of my favorite memories from the whole trip. I believe it was our third night there, a Sunday night, and we have spent all day exploring a few different neighborhoods of London. After a busy day, my roommate for the trip inform me that her and a few others were headed back out to the punk neighborhood of Camden to experience the bar scene. Now, since the legal drinking age in London is 18, I became legally inebriated. Banging my head around to punk rock music looking at “Fuck the Establishment” decorations and the many piercings of the people moshing around us with pints of beer in each hand. After the rest of the group had gone off to another bar to take shots with some locals, my roommate and I made our way to the “tube” as we were at least an hour away from our hotel and the subway stops running to certain stations at this time of night.

We obviously had to stop for some “bubble pancakes” before we ventured into the underground system. So, with Nutella dripping from our weird waffle snack, we found ourselves on a line that would take us within a 15 minute walk of the hotel. The train was packed, all seats taken, only standing room left. We crammed in. Holding onto a metal pole alongside four strangers with one hand and our delicious drunken treat in the other. After a couple of stops, my roommate began to complain of a full bladder, the kind that comes from beer and more beer. We had 30 more minutes left on this train and then another 15 to where we knew a bathroom existed. England is not really known for its abundance of easily accessible public amenities. We tried to talk about other matters. After a few mores stops, we found two seats in the very last car. My roommate and I were getting a little slap happy likely from all the sugar kicking in, the urgency of her bladder, and the panicky excitement of navigating the streets of a foreign country at less than our full mental capacity.

All of a sudden, my roommate burst out laughing, gazing upward onto the sloped part of the ceiling where the advertisements go. On a white background, there was a little boy in a puffer jacket jumping for some Target-esque company. But what had made my roommate laugh was the writing next to the kid. “These prices will make you” was in small lettering followed by bold, jump-off-the-page graphics reading “FULL OF BEANS.”

“What the fuck does that mean?!”, my roommate spoke louder than a sober tourist ever would. We guessed and grappled with the phrase until our station arrived. Maybe it meant satiated, as in you literally ate a lot of beans and are now full. Possibly, it was like the British version of “full of baloney”. Regardless, we decided in that moment that my roommate was most certainly full of beans and I was only maybe full of beans. As we got off the tube, the bladder issue was only componded by the fact that all the staircases up to the street were “out of order” (which I did not know was possible) and most of the people from the train had gotten off at this stop. We all filed towards the only elevator in sight and waited in the hoard of people to be allowed into the small elevator with five other lucky people. In this wait, my roommate and I continued to chat and being “full of beans” kept making it’s way into conversations. We used ot as the punchline to jokes and as a quippy comback like we were a child newly introduced the words and still figuring out how they fit into their vocabulary.

A man next to us asked to those who could hear him, “What if there was a fire right now? We only have an elevator!” My roommate, more in response to me than to him said, “Well then, I’d be full of beans! Hell, I am full of beans right now!” The man shot us a look that felt like he was both put at ease and pitying the dumb Americans. We decided that must not have been the proper usage of the phrase. After we finally got out of the elevator, no longer giving a damn about the people still waiting, we know had to navigate through streets with no right angle and irregular lengths of blocks. We skipped and we ran. We laughed and we desperately needed to pee. We navigated using only our memory from the first day we arrived in London as our phone’s seemed to have skipped our mind. Not because we were drunk, but because, you see, we were full of beans. We should have been scared or at least yelled a little less. We should have remembered that we were in an unfamiliar place. We should have done and felt a lot of things, but by golly we were full of beans. We wandered, riding the ecstasy of the phrase with no definition, or at leSt one we would not know for another 10 hours. In the morning, we would remember our phones existed. Yet, as we walked into our hotel , all we knew is that we most certainly were: full of beans.

***

To save you the google, the Oxford Languages Dictionary defines the phrase to mean lively or in high spirits. Funnily, the example sentence given is: “She was laughing and shouting and generally full of beans”. It is almost eerie how close we were to correctly using the phrase with very little context (the little boy was not that expressive). The phrase originates from when British farmers used to feed their horses fodder made of beans. The horses fed this diet were found to be more energetic than those eating barley. I have found myself thinking of this night quite a bit over the last few days. When I try to sum up all of the feelings and thoughts I have about that night, I am left only with gratefulness for serendipity, for the good luck of finding valuable things unintentionally.

What are moments of joy if not also moments of serendipity?

Before I started this trip, it became clear to me that happiness, as I have come to know it, is not an emotion. You cannot live with only a single emotion, because emotions come and go without warning. Yet, there are people who say they live a happy life and genuinely mean it. If you continue to grapple with this imbalance of word usage and word definition, you are left to understand happiness as a way of living. It was never something that you could posses, one emotion, to have and told hold as long as you both shal live. No! Happiness is compossed of all the emotions we experience, but it is the decision to relish in the moments of joy. It is the decision to commit those times to memory and then remember the emotion of joy when it is absent. Happiness is the decision to consciously experience all emotions, so that when joy returns, you are aware of it.

Up until this trip, the last time I can remember being full of beans is when I learned the phrase. This is not to say that I was never experiencing positive things over the last ten months, but rather I wasn’t paying enough attention to even realize it. On the tube and in the streets of London, I forgot I was worried about a test coming up and forgot that I was in a fight with one of my actual roommates. I had no emotions to fear and no thoughts to avoid. I existed and observed and found a moment of joy. If serendipity is the good fortune of finding joyful moments and valuable experiences unintentionally, the only thing you need to do is look around.

I have felt many emotions while on this trip and I have felt them intensely. I removed all of my methods for numbing negative emotions and ignoring nagging thoughts. The result is that I am feeling everything all of the time. By allowing myself to feeling anything and observing those feelings as they come, I am finding moments of joy all around me. I want to share a few of them here because it it not enough to just experience them and acknowledge that they are happening. I need to remember them, record them for the times when my emotional permenence is a bit wary.

***

While I was in Iowa, at the campsite with “ clean, hot showers”, I saw fireflies for the first time in 13 years. As the sun began to set, I didn’t trust what I saw. I assumed there must be twinkling lights strung up around the campground or a sequin stuck to a blade of tall grass glinting the reflection of the sun. I had forgotten that fireflies even existed. All of a sudden, there was another blinking light about 15 feet in a differnt direction, then one by the tree that was shading me, and then another by the road. I stood up and spun around, watching them all flouresce in the shadows. I wanted to run into my grandmother’s old garage and find the pckle jar she kept just for special occasions. I wanted to catch one and show my mom. But, all I could do was watch and smile. For the next 40 minutes, that is all I did. I sat in the grass and let all of them float and flutter around me.Tikvah was leaping and jumping at these bugs that kept evading her capture. We went to bed that night joyful and woke up happy.

In Minnesota, there were lots of rainstorms and not the kind you can manage to stay dry in. I spent a lot of time crammed in the back of my car, but refusing to sit on the bed as I am trying to make sure the bed is only for sleeping. Sometimes I would read or journal. Other times I would just listen. There is a comforting familiarity to the sound of big rain drops smattering across the metal roof of a car. The sharpness is amplified, while the thuds become a hum in the background of the world. All of a sudden, it is a symphony composed soundtrack to your life passing by. It is the sound of your mother driving you home from the pool in a summer afternoon thunderstorm. It is the sound of your final day of seventh grade on the outside door of your science classroom that at one point was allowed to open. It is the sound of the darkness as you sit in your best friends car at the top of the world at midnight. It is the sound of the two of you talking about the things you will do after highschool, after you figure out how to get out of here. It is the sound of you smiling to yourself. It is the sound you fall asleep to knowing you have so much to do and you just can’t wait to get started. Eventually, it is just the sounds of rain on the roof of your car.

Driving down the far less infamous Route 2 in North Dakota, I was once again surrounded by corn fields. Turns out that more state have them beyond Nebraska and Iowa. All there is to see is straight highways and straight rows of corn. Grey and green flicked past my peripheral for three straight hours as I fought to stay awake. All of a sudden, a swath of yellow comes up over a hill. I assumed it was some vibrant train cars or construction equipment, but then it grows. It grows into an entire field of bright sunflower-esque yellow.The people who associate happiness with the color yellow must be thinking of this. I am awake and alert and most likely full of beans. As it passes I wish I had stopped and gotten a picture, but sometimes going eighty miles per hour feels as fast as life and you just can’t seem to stop. I have no clue what the yellow field was filled with. Chance are high it was corn at a stage in it’s life cycle I have never seen before, but it was beautiful. The rest of the drive I kept my eye on the horizon, hoping another yellow field would appear and when it did I soaked it in, imagined myself laying down in the sun, engulfed by all this color.

Today, as I was trekking across primitive roads to find my planned campsite, I was welcomed by a sign that read: “Warning: Road Washed Out Ahead”. Within a few more yards, there was indeed no more road, only a steep cliffside and a field 10 feet below. So, while I expertly maneuvered an artful 13 point turn, I hoped there was some cell service in this place which was looking more and more like the deserted Wild West with tumble weed blowing by and not a tree in sight. Turns out an empty field has full bars! I really think that road should be the site of AT&T’s next marketing campaign, but I digress. I found a national recreation area campground only 40 miles away that had one site left to reserve. Named “Downstream Campground” I assumed there was probably a river or stream near the campsite which meant there may be some trees! I went ahead and booked the site and began the arduous journey out of the random field I had found myself in. (Subaru’s cannot accelerate all that well, but they can cross a small creek and crater filled field without bottoming out). As I was rolling over the stretches of highway that I like to refer to as roller coaster roads ( the ones that are composed of large rolling hills where you get adrenaline from coming to the crest only to see the steep decline ahead of you), I am rather mindlessly driving. Travelling through a sea of muted sage green and beige, I catch a glimpse of a blue oasis. I assume it is only my imagination because my navigation doesn’t show any bodies of water and I have seen nothing but rocks (sorry Geos) for the last 30 miles and willl continue to see only rocks for the next 5 hills. About 2 miles from the campground, I feel the engine pushing me the steepest incline yet. All of the sudden, the whole world is blue. The sky and the ground meet and are indistinguishable. I have to remind myself that there are no oceans in between the U.S. and Canada. Turns out the campground is downstream from the Fort Peck Dam Project, but all I could think about was how big it was. Considering I was expecting a little stream, this took my breathe away. I immediately pulled off at the nearest overlook to try and see it all. Even standing at the highest place around, I couldn’t see the end of the water’s edge. As the sky was swallowing the earth, I felt grateful once more for moments of serendipity, for these moments of joy.