Is there any joy so great as escaping a parking ticket?

When people talk about finding joy in life, they normally mean the big things – nature, God, a sense of service. Half your luck, I say, when these things are available, but often we must take pleasure in the smaller joys.

Catching a sequence of green lights, one after the other. Or claiming a parking spot right outside the place you need to go (yelling “rock star park” to celebrate the moment). Or finding the computer cable you need in the first place you looked, rather than the last.

This past weekend, I had one of these joyous moments – discovering I hadn’t been booked by the parking ranger, even though I’d outstayed my welcome. I’d parked in a two-hour spot, knowing I’d be away for 30 minutes longer.

I’d parked in a two-hour spot, knowing I’d be away for 30 minutes longer.Credit: Eddie Jim

Half an hour over? No way would I be caught, but then – walking to my destination – I saw the swarm of parking rangers, noting down number plates. My chance of being detected had risen from “unlikely” to “almost certain”.

But here’s the thing, back at my car two-and-a-half hours later, there was no fine, even though other cars had tickets on their windows. Oh, the exhilaration. Oh, the joy! It was like being handed $136, the crisp notes counted into my hand by a beneficent deity.

Many of life’s pleasures, it strikes me, are about the status quo reasserting itself after moments when you were expecting the worst. Your humdrum life, it emerges, wasn’t so bad after all. Thanks, bad news, for the reminder.

Many of life’s pleasures, it strikes me, are about the status quo reasserting itself after moments when you were expecting the worst.

Most obviously: you’ve been diagnosed with some awful disease, then get the all-clear. Or you make a terrible, career-ending mistake at work, but then no one notices (this happens to me all the time). Or the car warning lights start flashing, and – just as you are calculating the thousand dollars involved in a trip to the mechanic – they stop flashing, the conclusion of the drama as mysterious as its beginning.

You almost want to say thank you to those falsely flashing warning lights, since the end of their flashing brings such giddy exhilaration.

I try to collect these tiny pleasures where I can. The satisfaction of faith has eluded me. Hard drugs are a no-go as I can’t stand the needles. I’ve tried meditating, but become distracted.

Yet still, there are joys to be had. There’s the $20 note, found in the pocket of a pair of jeans I haven’t worn for years – money from the past that has been transported to the present. It is money earned by the person I was a decade ago, presented as a gift to the person I am now. What joy. I thank you, person of the past. I drink to you with the bottle of wine you have purchased – a rather nice $16 shiraz from McLaren Vale, leaving me with $4 still to spend.

A bar of chocolate? Some nuts? That $4, being free money, will be so easy to spend.

It’s why I hate those councils who no longer pop a ticket on your windscreen. You don’t know you’ve been fined until a couple of weeks later when the bill arrives in the mail. First, this means you can no longer take a photo if you believe you’ve been unfairly fined. Second, more importantly, you are robbed of that moment of delight when you see your unadorned windscreen and think: “Wacko, I committed a crime, then got away with it.” What bliss.

We take our pleasures where we can. In high school economics, we were taught about the consumer surplus. This is the difference between the price of something and the highest price you’d be willing to pay.

Seen through this lens, life is full of delights. At the second-hand bookstore the other day, I picked up Judith Wright’s The Generations of Men – genius book, out of print – for $4. I would have paid $50. On the way home, I enjoyed an excellent lamb kebab that cost $14 but was worth $16. It was not yet noon, and I was up $48. Throw in the $20 I found in my old jeans, and I was basically Twiggy Forrest.

A glass of Sydney tap water, glugged down on a hot day, is worth at least $2, and yet is effectively free. Ditto the sunny day that happens to coincide with a weekend, and the stretch of beach on which to enjoy it.

In much of Europe, people pay for drinking water and for a spot on the beach. Maybe, aside from the consumer surplus, we could add an Australian surplus to mark the luck of living here.

I mentioned all these sunny thoughts to a friend, who thought about it for a minute and then said: “Are you sure those other cars had tickets on their windscreens? Because that’s one of the council areas where they now just post out the fines. The envelopes on the windscreens were probably advertising flyers.”

Ugh. Instantly, I knew she was right. In a week’s time, the fine will arrive and the $136 that I had mentally forfeited, and then seen returned, will be taken once more.

The small joys can make your day, but the small tribulations sure can ruin it.

The Booklist is a weekly newsletter for book lovers from books editor Jason Steger. Get it delivered every Friday.