The Happiness Index

Before Europe, I'd read a report: the Netherlands sits perennially in the world's top five happiest countries. I'd always wanted to know what, exactly, they knew.

Day five, my field research produced preliminary findings.

Lucas borrowed two bikes and rode us out of town. Dutch bike lanes are absurdly good, absurdly flat; the wind, however, is permanently in your face — he rode half a length ahead of me to break it, which I only worked out afterward. Sheep on the dike, drainage canals slicing the fields into green tiles, clouds low enough to grab a handful.

We stopped in the middle of absolutely nowhere, because I saw the flowers.

A whole field of wild daisies — white petals, yellow hearts — spilling down the dike all the way to the water.

I dropped the bike and walked straight in. Took my shoes off, too. The earth was cool. The wind pressed the whole field flat and let it go, pressed and let go, like someone breathing far away. I stood in the flowers and lost every word I had.

Not because it was beautiful. Because it was familiar.

"You're smiling," Lucas said from the edge of the field.

"I smile all the time."

"Not that one," he said. "That's the one you do when nobody's being managed."

See — that's Lucas's defect. His honesty operates like a code review: it goes straight for the one comment you buried deepest. Five days in, I had his bug list: One — certainty, infuriating certainty; you won't be seasick today, the wind is changing, never a word of reasoning shown, like a brilliant engineer who refuses to write documentation. Two — a locked room somewhere in him. Twice now, mid-conversation, his eyes had gone somewhere for a few seconds — not drifting; drifting is diffuse. His was focused, like he was looking at something specific. Ask, and you get: it's nothing.

Defect number three surfaced that evening.

We were sitting at the field's edge splitting a paper cone of frites when his phone rang. Screen up. I wasn't trying to look, but peripheral vision caught the caller's name trailed by three letters: ZKH. It would be a while before I learned that's an abbreviation for a hospital.

He glanced at it and flipped the phone face-down in the grass, one smooth motion, casual as brushing away a fly.

"Not taking it?"

"Not important," he said. Then he fished a small tin from his pocket, tipped out a little white tablet, and swallowed it dry. Caught me watching. Rattled the tin. "Mint. Want one?"

I said no. And in that moment a very quiet voice in me said: that is not a mint. But the sun was right, the field was right, and when he settled down next to me his shoulder touched my shoulder, warm — so I smothered the voice. When you're happy, even an alarm sounds like a ringtone.

"So," I said. "Why are you people so happy? Top five globally. I read the report."

He gave it genuine thought.

"Because we know it's going to rain," he said. "So on the days it doesn't, we don't do anything else."

The wind flattened the field again. He turned his head, and those grey-blue eyes were very close, close enough that I could see a very small me inside them.

Then he kissed me. Or I kissed him. Who authored that commit remains disputed; we relitigated it many times and never reached consensus.

Top-five happiest country on earth, and the secret turns out to be: knowing it will rain.

What I didn't know that day — rain was the least of what he knew.