Ian Warden | Tiny, happy scenes of everyday life

Invited writers are contributing short essays to a series called What makes me happy now. The most recent of the essays is Helen Garner on happiness and Garner, being the excellent thinker and writer she is, the essay bristles with engaging observations and ideas.

What's more, Garner's essay's methodology suggests a beguilingly helpful self-psychotherapeutic way of thinking about Life and Happiness.

"It's taken me 80 years to figure out," she confides, "that [happiness] is not a tranquil, sunlit realm at the top of the ladder you've spent your whole life hauling yourself up to, rung by rung. It's more like the thing that Christians call grace ... It exists all right, it will be given to you, but it's fluid, it's evasive ... It's something you glimpse in the corner of your eye ...

"So I'm not going to spend what's left of my life hanging round waiting for it. I'm going to settle for small, random stabs of extreme interestingness, moments of intense awareness of things ... of gladness that they exist."

So, for example, she reports appreciating the moment of "the theatre nurse gripping my hand at the moment the anaesthetist knocks me out" and the exciting realisation of "how little it takes to please me".

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Then there's "Stuck in traffic on Brunswick Road, listening to Glen Campbell singing By the Time I Get to Phoenix. I know every note, every pause, every beautiful American place-name - Albuquerque, Oklahoma - and the freight of what's left unsung. Why is he leaving? Why didn't she believe he would? The singer's voice hovers over the woman, her door, her work, her bed, while he vanishes down the endless highway - he's a tail-light, a pin-point, and he's gone."

Please, please read for yourselves in its entirety Garner's piece, with its celebration of the joy of "tiny scenes" often of everyday Melbourne life.

Meanwhile in reverent imitation of her idea and in sometimes parochial celebration of tiny scenes from everyday Canberra life, here are some happiness-stoking tiny scenes collected by this columnist.

The sheer mardi gras gaiety of my garden's dahlias (rapturously obsessed, I grow 25 varieties of these popinjays) as if I have somehow created a gallery of herbaceous Hawaiian shirts.

How (still on gaiety) my manly tennis hero Francis Tiafoe wore at the Australian Open exquisitely feminine floral tennis shoes featuring bright red flowers standing out on a background colour Nike is calling "coconut milk". How I am counting the sleeps until my online-purchased pair of these wonders (size a manly 10.5) arrives. How (for Canberra fogeydom is in a class of its own) I am looking forward to the vexed, tsk tsk disapproval of my tennis club's dress-code fogeys.

At my local shops thrilling to the sudden, deep, melodious, softly thunderous grrrrrrumble of a new Ford Mustang as its owner turns its key. Thinking how creative Ford's sonic artists have been with their attempt to imagine and recreate the lost sound of the mega-growl of the Sabre toothed Tiger (it weighed 450 kilos), extinct for 10,000 years.

Seeing an actual attractive person, a woman with an intelligent (albeit at this moment bewildered) expression on her face, at Bunnings in Fyshwick. The spectacle of her surprises and delights, for Bunnings-going Australians are overwhelmingly bogan-nondescript, looking as if they buy their clothes, too, at Bunnings. What does this tiny scene mean? Who is she? What is she doing here, looking so lost in the bathroom fittings aisle? In my happiness I choose to imagine it is this uptown girl's first ever visit to a Bunnings and that she is a confused concert cellist shopping for strings for her cello and about to discover they are not something Bunnings stocks.

How, walking blissfully alone in remote corners of the National Arboretum in this greenly gorgeous Canberra February I find that everywhere spiders are using the regular, three-metre spaces between plantations' tree and shrubs to engineer and install fabulous, king-sized-blanket-sized webs with three-metre spans, the dew giving these already beautiful weavings an extra, bejewelling lustre.

How seeing all this my deeply-appreciative heart chirrups "Thanks be to Canberra, to Canberra's best-in-the-world spiders and to Saint Jon (Stanhope) the Arboretum's visionary-in-chief."

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