It’s a Friday afternoon in February 2020 and I’m sitting on a bench along the South Bank of the River Thames somewhere between the Tate Modern and the London Eye, not that far from the Millennium Bridge. The sky’s that color of blue of which writers struggle to find just the right when describing perfection.

I’m happy, calm, relaxed, just sitting. I’m eating ice cream and watching people walk by and parents pushing strollers. Across the river, the London skyline sparkles in the sun. I see plane flying high overhead. It’s about as close to the perfect moment, the perfect time, that I have ever experienced.

There’s some problems out on the horizon. Wildfires are devastating Australia. Covid-19 has fully taken hold in China and the London tabloids are full of stories of Brits stranded on cruise ships who are suffering from Covid or who are being quarantined because of a case on the ship. Donald Trump is president.

I don’t care about any of this. Not at this moment. I’m a vacation and visiting a city of my dreams for the first time in my life. I’d just finished a very complicated audit for a client in which I’d worked an awful lot of hours and had nearly suffered a physical breakdown which was eventually determined to be nothing but stress. I’ve got a little money in the bank for the first time in forever. I’d gone to some West End plays, taken a train through the Chunnel under the English Channel.

On this night I’m going to see an Agatha Christie play and in the morning I’m back on the train and heading to Amsterdam, one of my favorite cities in the world where I’m going to spend the next few days roaming the streets, nothing planned, before heading back home.

I’ve been thinking about this day, this moment, since yesterday because, damn, things are bad out in the world. U.S. residents have been kidnapped and sent to concentration camps in El Salvador. The National Weather Service has been gutted, the FDA has announced that it’s having to cancel food inspections because it no longer has enough employees, and the Trump Administration has basically told the Supreme Court to fuck off.

I’m fully aware of what’s going on in the world, and I want to stay informed of what’s happening. But there comes a time during the day, every day, when I just need to escape if just for a few seconds. That’s when this Spice Girls’ song pops up on my Apple Music and suddenly I’m in London and I’m on the bench and I’m in that perfect day.

Part of what made that day so perfect is that it’s the day I realized that I love art. Not just like art in that I can appreciate some classic painting and feel that obligation to stop into various museums when I visit places. But instead the joy of turning a corner in a museum and seeing something unexpected that blows me away and in which I just want to disappear.

I felt stupid when I first saw Yves Klein’s IKB 79 because it’s literally just a big monochrome painting. Yes it’s blue and blue is my favorite color, but in years past I’ve joked about this kind of stuff and said I didn’t get it and that the people who liked stuff were deluding themselves just so they could seem cool. So I walked past it, did a kind of internal chuckle in my head, and looked at more of the other pieces in the room, but I made myself look at again and then I walked out to explore some more of the Tate Modern — a place that had already kind of blown me away from an architectural standpoint.

But I came back to the painting several times and each time I just stared at it for a longer and longer amount of time and I let is soak it in and I let the color engulf me and I fell in love with this work of art.

It’s when I’m sitting on that bench a little later that day, looking out over London, into that perfect blue sky, that I realize why this painting has impacted me so. It’s not perfection that I see. It’s not just a color of blue. I’ve seen happiness. This painting, to me, is endless, boundless, perpetual optimism. Nothing has hit me like this before.

Months later, when I’m in intensive care recovering from my second surgery, having nearly died, starting to freak out as the drugs I’ve been on finally start wearing off and I fully realize what has happened, it’s this painting that I start thinking of and that keeps me from flipping out and calms me down — luckily I’d taken a photo of it and had that photo stored on my phone so that I could look at that photo, not that I really needed the photo because the painting had become imprinted on my mind.

And yesterday when that Spice Girls song came on it flipped me back to that moment in time when I was sitting on that bench and I was happy and I was experiencing happiness. I know that things are bad, but at times we just have to pause, if even for a second, and experience something besides dread, even if it just thinking about to a perfect day and having experienced the perfect piece of art.

To quote from that Spice Girls song:

don't you know it's going too fast?
(Ooh) racing so hard you know it won't last
Don't you know, why can't you see?
Slow it down, read the sign so you know just where you're going

Stop right now, thank you very much
I need somebody with a human touch
Hey you, always on the run
Gotta slow it down, baby, gotta have some fun