An Exquisite Moment of Delight

I recall one day in high school, when I was in the eleventh grade, sitting in chemistry class.

Now ours was a small high school, both in terms of the student body and the physical size of the building. There were only about 50 students in the entire school, about a dozen students in each grade -- my own grade had a whopping 15 guys. Ours was an all-boys school; there was a sister-school for the girls, located about 2 miles away.

So back to chemistry class. Our chemistry class was held in a lab, as opposed to a classroom, which meant that instead of sitting at desks, we all sat on stools, around a counter area where we occasionally conduct experiments. So the proximity of each student to his neighbor was considerably closer than in a normal classroom situation.

Have you ever, out of the blue, had an exquisite moment of delight? Now absolutely nothing specific has happened to trigger it. But for some reason, you are enveloped by an intense feeling of joy. You are thrilled to be alive. You are tickled pink by the very fact that you exist! Your mind is flooded with the realization that here you are on this mind-boggling planet, with its myriad fascinating people, places, activities and experiences, and the pleasure of being a part of it all sends a payload of serotonin to your brain. The result: a wonderful burst of elation.

So there I am sitting in chemistry class, minding my own business, when all of a sudden my brain sends this spontaneous message to me: "Life is wonderful!" And why not? After all, it was a great period of my life. Unlike many people I have since encountered, for me high school 'rocked', as they say.

So seized was I by this surge of happiness that I felt a need to express it somehow. And, naturally, the instrument I chose to express my joy was to slap the classmate who was sitting on the stool next to mine square on the thigh, producing an entirely satisfying whack! That classmate was a very good friend of mine, and quite remarkably, he was not in the least angry or upset at my overzealous expression of enthusiasm. Evidently, he intuited what I was experiencing, and accepted it.

Not so my chemistry teacher. As a bit of background on him, let me share what I consider two defining incidents:

• In the previous year, the senior class actually had only three students. I kid you not. And only two of them took chemistry that year. One day, one of those two was absent, and so there was a grand total of just one student in chemistry class that day. At one point in the class, he had to excuse himself to go to the bathroom. Upon returning to class, he discovered that during his brief absence, the chemistry teacher had continued to lecture to an empty classroom.
• One day, on which I was blessedly absent, this same teacher conducted an experiment with my class involving chlorine gas. You know, the one used by the Germans in World War I, to poison the allied troops. At any rate, at one point during the experiment, several of my classmates told the teacher that they could smell the gas leaking. Nonsense! was the reply. It wasn't until a few of my classmates were actually lying on the floor gasping that he entertained the possibility that perhaps some gas had in fact leaked.

So this was not a man whose reaction to my exuberant outburst was going to be: "Ah! How special that one of my students is experiencing a moment of spiritual ecstasy!" No, what undoubtedly went through his mind was: "Geez! As if I don't have a tough enough time teach these kids a bit of chemistry, now I have to worry about these maniacs slapping each other?!" His rather irate reaction probably stemmed as much from fear as anything else. Ah, if only I could have made him understand that mine was simply an expression of good will and nothing else. How unfortunate that so often in life, a person's intent often diverges so widely from the manifestation thereof.

At any rate, I continue to experience exquisite moments of delight to this day. But, thankfully, I have since learned to express them in ways that would not alarm my chemistry teacher.