Find Your Happy Place
/By Don Varyu
Jul 2025
You deserve a break—every day
don’t have to tell you what a miserable place the world is right now. Like me, you probably spend too much time dwelling on it.
And on top of all that, you can layer on your own personal things: maybe a sick kid, a lousy boss, an upcoming bill you’re not sure how you’re going to pay.
It can feel like too much because sometimes it IS too much!
Which is why, above all, you’ve got to find a happy place. Life requires an escape hatch. It’s the place you go to get away from it all…and hopefully it doesn’t come in a form of relief that could turn into addiction.
My happy place is weird—I admit it. But I can’t turn my back on it because it always—every time!—makes me almost deliriously happy.
And I want to show it to you….
This is the iconic final number from the movie Pitch Perfect. It makes me joyous, I can’t not smile, and to be honest (at the risk of being thrown out of the man club) it will often bring me to tears. It just makes me feel so goooood.
I can’t really explain it—maybe I shouldn’t even try. But to me, there is nothing more expressive of the human spirit than singing and dancing. And that’s particularly true when the singing is done a cappella, with minimal or non-existent instrumental support—just people blending and harmonizing their voices. And this musical number is emblematic of the plotline in each of the films. They love and support each other—exactly what has been subtracted from America.
The plot context is not original. These are just a bunch of young women overcoming disagreement and stresses to make beautiful music together. But these actresses are also humans, and I think of them during their endless hours of rehearsal, trying to perfect the intricacies of this marvelous mashup…and the days they spent grinding toward the precise execution of the choreography. Wow, what a feat!
Anyway, this might not be your thing. It doesn’t have to be. But I hope you DO have a thing…your own secret place which sparks your own moments of joy.
You deserve it.
