Lekker-ness

The entry from my bilingual dictionary is actually quite amusing.

lekker, (-s), n. sweet.
lekker, a. & adv. nice, sweet, delicious; fine; tight, tipsy; - koel, nice and cool; - ruik, smell sweet; - eet, enjoy one's food; nie - voel (wees) nie, not feel well; hy voel nie - daaroor nie, he is not happy about it.
lekkerbek, epicure, gourmet.
lekkerbekkig, (-e), sweet-toothed, fastidious.
lekkergoed, sweets, sweetmeats.
lekkerheid, niceness, deliciousness; vide lekker.
lekkerkry, pleasure.

(And five or six more entries.)

I love to rant about this word, because it is so wonderfully veelsydig, which my dictionary translates "multilateral; many-sided; versatile." (Versatile is probably the one I'm looking for, but I prefer veelsydig. The etymology's more accessible.)

My dictionary does not even come close to encompassing the word's full meaning. "Lekker" works as a superlative adjective to be tacked onto just about any descriptive word - I am lekker hungry, I am lekker tired, I am lekker excited, I am lekker warm. You can say someone's not lekker in the head, you can use it to express how utterly comfortable your new shoes are, you can use it to say in just one word that you had a perfectly restful night of sleep, that you had a nice shower, or a good run. Generally, though, it refers to that feeling you get when you've just had a hell of a jolly good old time. It's the jolly good time I'm after today. I would like to rant about what it means to live lekker.

It first occurred to me when I was reading the book we're working through in the Christian Studies class I'm currently taking. This book is entitled "Engaging God's World," and it's written by Cornelius Plantinga. He was talking for a bit about the concept of Sehnsucht, which I like to translate as a homesickness for things other than just home. "For example, we want to be reunited with a happy time or a lovely place or a good friend. We look at a green valley and want to crawl under its covers. We think of a happy home and want to dwell in its center. We keep wanting to 'get back' or to 'get in.'" But then he delivers the punchline.

"What's remarkable is that these longings are unfulfillable."

He goes on to explain that we cannot literally swallow a valley or dive into the past, and that God is the only thing, only person, through which or about which one can ever experience such fulfillment. I would like to make a caveat on this explanation, because my own experience tells the story slightly differently.

In the nearly eighteen years I have walked this earth, I have generally enjoyed a pretty satisfied existence. To this day I am convinced there never existed a happier toddler or a more gleeful young child, and continually strive to love life the way I always did. Many people disagree that children are capable of much depth, but I refuse to dismiss as shallow the happiness, the joy, the feeling of utter wonderfulness about the world that I knew as a three- or four- or ten-year-old kid. It was not shallow. It was not diminished. It was one of the biggest things I know about to this day. The amount of age on one's resume does not necessarily increase or decrease their ability to feel. No matter how big the being is, when the entirety of that being explodes into laughs and jitters of ecstasy because life is simply good, I believe it's valid to say that that person has been to the stars and back. 100%. There was simply no higher up.

If I am to say that I have had a generally happy life, I must also include that I have led a rather dynamic life. I would never for a moment pretend I've seen everything life has to offer me, but I have an internal planetarium in which I have turned 360. As much as I have burst the seams of laughter, I have also torn boundaries on the oposite end of the spectrum. I am certainly not alone in this, and it's not something impressive to boast about, but I have known since I was six years old what it means to have a broken friendship, what it means to yearn for God, what it means to be a bitch, what it means to be alone, what it means to have peace and to have turmoil. I have known since eight what it means to fall in love, I have known since nine what it means to pour life into music, since ten what it means to have a broken heart, since twelve what it means to have a broken soul, since thirteen what it means to have an utterly broken mind. And in those lows, I have hit my -100%. Perhaps "100%" will mean "100/100" instead of "10/10" one day, but the fact doesn't change that I have long hit both top and bottom.

And there is no doubt in my mind that I have experienced the fulfillment of sehnsucht: the desire to hit, burst, and vertex at +/-100%, like a stunt plane diving and soaring through the sky.

When I was eight years old, I disliked all music but Classical music. No, I'm not talking about Rock and Pop and Metal... I mean Romantic and Contemporary and 20th-century American music. I liked my neat scales and cadences, my 1-3-5s and Alberti patterns. Whenever some genre-stretching opportunity was presented to me, I would pick out individual measures that sounded cacophonous to me and play dissonant chords over and over again in frustration, claiming that it was bad music if I couldn't predict more or less what would come next, if every bit of it didn't sound pretty.

I've changed of opinion, by the way.

What my teacher and the music itself eventually managed to get through to me is that beautiful things are all about tension and resolution. The music I loved then still had those things in them, they simply manifested differently, in mood instead of music. Even if the chords themselves were never particularly dissonant, the feelings they inspired in me were. It was when I learned how to thoroughly appreciate that darkness, that suffering, that dissonance, and break through the other side, exploding into the brightness, that I fell in love with music. It's also the first time I remember having fulfilled sehnsucht.

It was the beginning of my fourth grade year and I was going through that stage where I hated practicing. It had lost its fun and novelty and it wasn't easy anymore and my mom nagged me and my teacher was forcing me to play Joplin and sightread... It sucked. I hid my Joplin under the couch cushions. Bad time for me. Eventually it became such a source of household conflict that my mother threatened to stop my lessons, and I, in my defiance, told her to do it. I'm not sure if hindsight exaggerates, but I was an emotional wreck for those two weeks. It was existential crisis. After about nine or ten days, I slowly sat down at the piano, in tears, and proceeded to play my favorite piece, Beethoven's Sonatina Op. 49, No. 2, Allegro ma non troppo. I had never played it well up to that point, I was still trying to bring it up to speed. It was partially because I was frustrated at my inability to play the piece up to standard that I had quit in the first place. I laid my fingers on the keys and closed my eyes, and with that first arpeggiated chord, was lost to the music forever. Poured my heart and my soul and pain and love for the music into every note, pouded my frustration into minor chords and cried my confusion into pianos. When the theme 1b came back around in the recap, I was standing in a sunny field at the top of a mountain, at the end of a beautiful story I'd created weeks prior to accompany the piece. And in the nature of that place, in the last few lines of the recap, I had embedded that pure joy I was talking about earlier: unbounded happiness. I cannot describe the satisfaction as I rediscovered this hidden joy - that fulfillment, that feeling that something has snapped into place in your gut, as if something enormous has been achieved, as if you've been pushed into momentum, as if you've stepped into a gust of wind, as if you've conquered the world or achieved unity with some greater power, as if I should be typing in caps. It's incredible and real and raw and it exists.

A few nights before I turned sixteen, I sat in my room a few minutes after midnight thinking about the past year.

JANUARY FIRST, 2010.

I went into 2000 sleeping, and woke the next day angry that no one had woken me up. I'm still angry about that. All I remember of the first day of this century, of the last decade, is that I spent a substantial amount of time sulking and crying. My memory may be distorted, but that's all I remember, and so that's all it was.

I went into 2009 sleeping, and woke a couple minutes later angry that I had never woken up. I'm still angry about that. All I remember of the first day of the last year in that decade is that I spent a substantial amount of time sulking and crying. My memory may be distorted, but that's all I remember, and so that's all it was.

Since then, I have grown in so many ways, I have experienced wonderful things, achieved so many wonderful things. I have learned things of every sort and kind, many that I will not forget for as long as I live, and many I cannot even describe. I gave in ways and to people I never could have predicted. I have loved so much, and I have never felt so alive ! ! !

Now, if that's not the "Shalom" Mr. Plantinga's been talking about.....

I remember receiving that same wave of exhilaration, that incredible, real, raw feeling of triumph, epiphany, defeat, resolution, peace, upon finishing that sentence. This was a time when I considered my life, in general, to be perfect... Life seemed eerily perfect, I admitted so to myself on numerous occasions. My life is pretty near perfect even now. It's in those moments when you get to realize that perfection you're living, when you find a way to scratch that itch, when you find some way to demonstrate it it, some tool through which to shoot the energy... (The same counts for the other end of the spectrum, and that, I believe I've touched on before with plentiful examples in Catharsis.) It is then that I've been able to experience such fulfillment.

There is no doubt in my mind that it is God that is responsible for the times in which we hit +100%. When after an hour of hiking, you make that one last grueling effort, just that one last step to the top of the mountain... and then finally, you've made it. I have no doubt in my mind that it is God that provides such satisfaction; all good things come from him. But I know just as firmly that any medium is open to his use; that even 8-year-old kid me could find that complete fulfillment by finally mounting the topmost branch in my tree, that even the most "godless" of people can see and love and know him through something that seems totally unrelated to the rest of us. It is in all good and in all bad that God is with us; it is in every single conquered breathless moment that he has given us the power to inhale.

It is for that reason, I suppose, that I live as near 100% as I can. I aim high, and often land there. (I'm sometimes made to wonder what 100% goodness would feel like when magnified by 100% efficiency, and then remember that that's probably the point of that thing called "Heaven.") When I don't, I try again, and when I fall, I get up and Up still seems to be in place. It is my attachment to that pure, divine, utmost good that pulls me out of the darkness when I am stuck there, and the same attachment that keeps me sane when I'm stuck in the light. It is he that sits with me when I hit both 100% top and 100% bottom.