High on Happiness

Archive for September, 2009

The media has spent a lot of time over the past two weeks talking about the amount of anger in America and about the need to return to civil dialogue over the issues where we disagree with one another.  But how, exactly, do we do that, when each side feels so passionately about its perspective?

That question began to roll around in my mind after I noticed that some of my usually friendly coworkers were beginning to think of each other as enemies after political issues drifted into their conversations.

We each tend to identify with our opinions and when someone opposes them, our defenses are triggered just as if we were suffering a personal attack.  But the truth is we aren’t our beliefs.  And when it comes to political opinions, it’s important to remember that opinions are just that: opinions, and nothing more.  They’re ideas based on theories about how we can best govern ourselves and about the principles and values by which we’ll measure our success. The human race has been squabbling about them since time immemorial.  We’re not going to solve the puzzle over the office cooler, and certainly not by allowing ourselves to become embroiled in hostility.

If you really care about political issues, take the time to study and consider both sides of them.  Don’t assume that “your side” will represent the opposition’s viewpoints accurately.  Listen to their arguments and their reasons for thinking as they do.  Learn about history and political science.  If you don’t care enough to take the time to seriously study an issue, consider whether your opinions are genuinely thoughtful.  Are they based on the political tradition of your family?  A couple teachers you liked?  The opinions you hear repeated on radio or TV?

Over the weekend, I ran across the wisdom-saying, “Be the change you want to see in the world.”  Personally, I want to see greater happiness in the world, and so I practice it.  I don’t want the happiness of my relationships disturbed by political arguments, so I simply don’t indulge in them.  When a friend expresses an opinion different than the one I hold, I don’t challenge it.  I may ask, out of genuine interest, why he thinks as he does.  And I thank him when he tells me.  And if he has given the matter real thought, I appreciate that and tell him so.  I acknowledge the depth of his emotions on the topic.  I respect his right to hold whatever opinion he chooses.  And our friendship goes along undisturbed.

The key to keeping yourself from falling into the hostility trap when it comes to political issues is to focus on the qualities you appreciate in the people whose opinions differ from yours instead of on your own emotional response to what they believe.  Appreciate their passion.  Notice how alive they are when they’re arguing for something they care about.  Watch how their eyes flash and how carried away they are with their feelings.  Learn from seeing how their intensity is so similar to your own, and remember the other things about them that make you more alike than different.   Listen to hear if they are saying anything that you may want to think about more deeply, or (as is usually the case) just repeating the sound bytes of the week.  Think about whether your own opinions are formed the same way.

When it comes right down to it, we all want the same things:  Food and water, shelter, clothing, health, education, gainful employment, freedom, peace.  Ensuring that most of us have them is a complex and uncertain task about which few of us, if we’re honest with ourselves, have any real clue at all.  So don’t let the hows chill your friendships.  Be the love and the peace that you want to see in the world.  Be happy for the differences that give life its spice.

On this last Saturday of summer, I walked in a golden meadow beneath a cloudless azure sky.  Beyond the field, the first crimson branches heralded autumn’s coming.  The flowers that dotted the meadow just two weeks ago had transformed into globes of seeds.  And bees were busy gathering the last drops of nectar from the glowing goldenrod.

I went there on impulse in the late afternoon, called by the scarlet hues of a single maple at the meadow’s distant edge.  The morning had been painted by colors of its own.  My travels had taken me down a country road where scarlet vines climbed the trunks of trees.  Then I happened on an apple orchard, with endless rows of trees heavy with bright fruit.  Behind the orchard’s store, hundreds of newly harvested pumpkins lined a high field in a brilliant swatch of orange.

The owner of the orchard was just leaving the store as I approached it, preparing to take a group of visitors on a hayride through the grounds.  “What a beautiful day!” his wife said, seeing him off.  “Just look at that sky!”

I bought dark red apples and deep blue Concord grapes, my favorites, and a jar of amber honey.

So vibrant were the day’s colors that I felt as if I had been placed in the midst of some grand Technicolor movie set in rural Pennsylvania.  Except it was real, with balmy air, and the fragrances of early autumn perfuming the atmosphere.

And now, here I was, in the golden meadow, and my heart was so full of the beauty of the day and appreciation for having lived it, that all I could do was breathe “Thank you.  Thank you.  Thank you,” as I walked.

I drove to work through a thick autumn fog, with the silhouettes of trees and telephone poles floating in and out of sight like ghosts in a dream.  Walking from the parking lot to my office, I noticed the quiet of the morning and realized, with a touch of sadness, that the songbirds have gone.  Now it will be only the hardiest species whose calls I will hear for the five long months of Pennsylvania’s winter—the cardinals, the jays, the brave little sparrows, the crows.

It was nearly noon before the fog burned away.  But when it did, the day was sparkling.  A large flock of Canadian geese flew past my window in the afternoon, heading South.

Wasn’t I just welcoming spring’s blossoms?  And here’s autumn already, shouting its arrival in bold splashes of crimson and gold.  The pleasures of the seasons are so fleeting, appearing and disappearing in a kaleidoscopic ribbon of fast-flowing time.

The trick is to call the moments of beauty out from each day, to hold them in your hands as if they were miracles.  For so they are.  And life is a never-ending flow of them.

Some wise soul once said that to be truly alive we should look at the world as if we were seeing it for the very first time—or for the last time.  Then we would be freshly astounded and wonderstuck by it, and by the incredible gift it is just to be here, in the midst of it.

Moms, I was thinking today, pass on a heap of guidance for living happily.  The instructions we heard from them, day in and day out, turn out to hold an awful lot of wisdom about the things that help us create happiness in our lives.

After I reviewed the bits of classic advice I got from my own mother, I made a little poster of them to hang on my wall as a reminder.  Chances are your mom said these same things to you . . .

Here’s a simple recipe for upping your happiness quotient:  Pick something you really enjoy doing and do more of it.  Do some of it every day.  Make it your mission.  Make it your goal.  Make it a sacred commitment.  And then keep doing it.  See what it teaches you.  See what gifts it holds.

Two and a half months ago, I decided to try this recipe myself.  So I picked photography as the thing I really enjoyed doing, and I made a commitment to make one photo every day good enough for me to post on my Flickr site, One-Song-Singing.  I had no idea when I began it what a joyous and meaningful part of my life this exercise would become.  But 75 days into it, I can say that it would take a major catastrophe to keep me from it.

Yes, it’s meant altering my daily routine.  I have had to push myself sometimes when I was tired or frazzled after a day of work to take the time for it.  Sometimes I have had to turn down invitations or say no to alluring distractions in order to keep my promise to myself.  But the benefits I’m receiving from keeping that commitment are so many and so rich that it’s worth every ounce of energy and time I have invested.  And I’m beginning to suspect that I have only seen the first layers of the treasures this exercise will hold.

What happens when you take time every day to do something you love is that you get better at it.  And that makes you love it more.  Then you find that it begins revealing things you never noticed about it before, and things about yourself as you interact with it.

Suppose you really liked playing with your kids and took half an hour every day to do just that and nothing more.  Can you imagine what you would learn about them?  And about yourself?  And about parenting?  Can you imagine the rewards you would get from showering them with daily, undivided attention, just for the joy of it?

Suppose you loved reading, and decided to set aside half an hour every day just to curl up with a good book.  Or that you decided to make time for a hobby, or sport, or to practice an art form, or study a particular topic of interest, or to keep a journal, or talk with someone you love.  What would a month of half-hours bring you from that?  What if you made it a part of your life for a year?  Can you imagine how enriched you would be?

Why not try it?  Take this little recipe and cook up some happiness.  After all, you have only one life.  Do more of what you love!

The key practice I’m currently using to hone my awareness of the happiness in my life consists of asking myself the question, “Why Am I So Happy Now?”   I keep little banners and sticky notes with those words tucked here and there to remind me.  When I happen to notice one of them, I’ve made it a habit to stop what I’m doing for a moment and let the answer come to me.

If you’re new to practicing happiness, adopting that question is a wonderful place to start.  It’s a magical little question, and you’ll be surprised at the answers it brings.

In the beginning (and sometimes when you’re having a rough day), you might find that when you ask yourself the question, “Why Am I So Happy Now?” some part of you says, “I’m not!  I’m not happy at all!”

The part of you that’s answering, though, is just one part of you and it’s looking at only one little pile of thoughts.  Don’t worry.  There’s another part of you that will keeping searching for the answer.  Gently say to the unhappy voice,  “I know you’re not and that’s okay.  But why am I so happy now?”

At first, you might notice only little straws of happiness, little specks.  For a second, something piques your interest – a sound perhaps.   (This morning, for example the neighbor’s rooster is crowing.  Its voice is like a contralto against the robin’s sweet song, a counterpoint, and it makes me laugh.)  It might be the flash of a smile from a passing stranger saying, “Hello, Fellow Human Being!” that made you smile before you stop yourself in return.    It might simply be a moment where you stretched your body, or took a deep breath.  Or when you noticed the way a shaft of sunlight fell across the scene before you.  Some little thing that, all of a sudden, you recognized as a flash of happiness will enter your mind as an answer to your question.

That’s the first step, just noticing those moments.  And the magic of the question is what makes the noticing happen.

All of us have happiness inside us somewhere.  The part of you that says, “No, I don’t.”  Or “Not in my life,” or “Not anymore,” has just forgotten where to look.  But it’s there, inside you, somewhere.  I promise.  Keep asking, “Why am I so Happy Now?” and. before long, another voice will start to sing.

Like the robin outside my morning window.  Try it and see.

One day, when I was about five years old, my mother said she couldn’t kiss me goodnight because so many toys lay scattered on the floor of my room that she couldn’t walk across it to get to my bed.  “Why sure you can!” I said.  “Look.  You can step there, and there, and then there.”  She laughed, and I got my kiss.

My mother’s untiring efforts to instill tidiness as a virtue took decades to bear fruit.  Not that I was totally disorganized.  Mom’s standards (and good example) did leave their mark to a certain degree.  But for most of my life, my organizational style was, as a neat-freak friend of mine so tactually said, “casual.”

Over the course of the past few years, though, things have changed.  Mostly, without my notice.  I started working as a secretary for a string of busy executives in some demanding, fast-paced environments.  Supporting them meant being able to locate papers and files and bits of data at a moment’s notice.  Just knowing which of many two-foot deep piles they were in wouldn’t cut it.  It also meant keeping track of deadlines and knowing what had to be done to meet them.  “A place for everything and everything in its place,” was my mom’s rule.  I put it to work.  I developed and then fine-tuned systems.  And now I’m very good at what I do.

But there was a hidden bonus to the organization I did at work.  It spilled over to my home life.  Little by little, clutter disappeared.  I am, I confess, still beleaguered by what I call “the perpetual paper pile.”  But even that has retreated from the countertops and tables to file cabinets and one little corner of my desk.  And my tolerance for its height has a definite limit.

What I’ve learned is that having my belongings and papers and schedules arranged in an orderly way is not only a huge time-saver and visually more pleasant, but it makes for a clearer mind as well.  When my line of sight isn’t interrupted by clutter, my thoughts are more clutter-free, too.  I’m not distracted – in either my physical or mental worlds – by having to dig through the same old bits of stuff over and over to put my finger on just the resource or tool or idea I want.  I can locate it instantly.

I grew up thinking that tidiness was a moral issue.  Keeping things orderly, I thought, was one of the things you had to do to be good.  Now I’ve learned that you do it to be relaxed and free.

I finally got Mom’s message.  She would be proud.

One of the things that makes practicing happiness so worthwhile is that, when you need happiness the most, it’s there.  I rediscovered that today when a bunch of little things that could have turned the day sour didn’t. Even when my drier broke, at 7:00 p.m., when I had one load of wet clothes in it and another load in the washer.

A non-functioning dryer, I should tell you, is a pretty big event for me.   Years ago, when I first realized how the culture was pressuring us all to be consumers, I decided I would define what my I needed to be comfortable and allow myself to be content as long as I met those needs.  I took for granted then the basic needs of food, clothing and a shelter equipped with electricity and indoor plumbing.  I decided my minimum requirements were a decently running car and my own washer and dryer.  Laundromats are somewhere near the list of things I appreciate in the world.

So after a long day of moving furniture from room to room to make space for a home gym I acquired last week, the last thing I wanted was a broken dryer.  A series of interruptions had stretched the work over several more hours than I’d planned for it.  I was tired, and hungry.  I had broken nails to repair.  I wanted dinner, and a shower, and time to relax before the work week caught me up in its whirl again.  A 10-mile trip to the nearest 24-hour laundry was not at all in alignment with my criteria for a pleasant evening!

But you know what?  I found myself laughing at the situation.  I decided not to compare it with my story of what I wanted, but to deal with the reality and make the best of it.  I looked around me at the pleasant spaces my day’s labor had created, put together a quick supper, grabbed a nail file and a book and headed out to get the clothes dried.

If I had been upset, I would have missed the beauty of the dusk, its gentle sunset, the rising of the first stars.   The fragrance of the balmy evening air rushing in my car’s open window would have escaped my notice entirely.  I wouldn’t have appreciated the new look of my rooms when I returned or have been so willing to sit down and write about happiness.

Why am I so happy now?  Because focusing on happiness skills is paying off.  Because I’m getting the knack of it more and more every day.  Because I can even be grateful for Landromats.

When I woke from sleep this morning, happiness spread itself across my mind.  Before I opened my eyes, before a single thought voiced itself, happiness was bathing me in its gentle light.  I felt my face ease into a smile just as my waking consciousness felt compelled to label what I was experiencing.  “Happiness!” it said, and my smile pushed into a grin.  “Happiness, for no reason at all.”

It’s really as simple as that, I thought.  You don’t need a why at all.  Because, in the end, happiness is causeless.  It’s not a result of something that happens to you.  It’s something that fills everything that is.

It’s not something we make happen, or that somebody else creates for us, or that comes because we’re in beneficial circumstances, or the recipients of good fortune.  Happiness is always already there.  Inside us, all around us, inside and between everything that is.

The reason we sometimes don’t know it is because we complicate things with whole lifetimes of concepts and beliefs about things we think we need to have in order to have happiness.  We go around thinking we have to be richer or thinner or smarter or more handsome, that we need more connections or money or power in order to be happy.  We think we’re kept from happiness by our pasts, or by the jobs we stuck in, or by our lack of a job, or by our mates or the lack of a mate.  But all those things are nothing more than ideas that blind us to the fact that we’re not separated from happiness by anything at all.

What do you believe you need in order to be happy?  And what would happen if you decided not to believe that?  What if you decided just to sink into happiness no matter what?   How would it feel?  How would you act?  Can you imagine?  Can you pretend?

And what if you practiced acting happy?  What if you intentionally put on a smile?  What if you practiced happy acts like gratitude and kindness and forgiving?

What if you looked for goodness in the people and events around you?  What if you noticed beauty?

What if you let yourself sink into happiness, for no reason at all?

I noticed a signature line today in a current events forum I frequent:  “Carpe Diem—it may be the only one you’ve got.”  The writer intended it as a comment on the state of world affairs in which we currently live, as a caution that because our world seems such a powder keg, we had better make the most of today.

I know that in certain circles, it’s popular to suggest that you should avoid the news, given its typically distressing nature, and focus instead on thoughts of a positive bent.  Personally, though, I prefer to know what’s happening around the planet, whether the news is scary or not, and even when it sometimes breaks my heart.

For me, keeping tabs on world events is a matter of satisfying my curiosity about the nature of outer reality.  It’s engagement with the world and part of the stewardship of citizenship.  Even when reading it suggests to me that the whole human race is galloping headlong toward cataclysmic disaster, I’m happier knowing the context in which I live than I would be not knowing.  I figure I can’t be part of the solution unless I have some understanding of the problem, after all.

But getting back to that signature line, “Carpe Diem” – Latin for “seize the day” – has been worthy advice since a poet named Horace first penned the words over 2,000 years ago.  The rest of the sentence that begins with those words is “and put no trust in tomorrow.”

Of course we all do put trust in tomorrow.  Trusting in tomorrow is what lets us dream and hope and plan; it’s what gives meaning to many of the activities we invest ourselves in today.

Nevertheless, tomorrow is an iffy kind of thing, even in the best of times.  And while we’d like to believe it will unfold more or less according to our expectations, that’s never a certainty.  The advice to grab hold of today is recognition of that fact.  “Carpe Diem” is a spirited reminder that today—in fact, this moment—is the only day we know we have.   It’s meant to be grabbed with eager attention and lived with vigor and zest.  And if we squander all its moments living for, or dreading, our tomorrows, we miss the riches it holds for us to enjoy.

It’s a reminder to be aware of those things that bring you happiness and satisfaction, and to take time to savor them in the here and now.  It’s a reminder to smell the roses, to appreciate good company, to feel gratitude for the things that comfort and challenge and strengthen and uplift us.  That’s how we make memories worth reliving, after all, and how we give our lives meaning and flavor and joy.

“Carpe Diem.”  It’s a bit of happiness counsel worth heading.  Put it on a sticky note somewhere that you’ll see it and when you do, take a moment to live its advice.