A Guide to Happiness (abbreviated version)

Are you happy? 

It seems like a simple question, but a lot goes into it.  Do you mean do I feel happy at the present moment?  Or am I happy with the way my life is going in the long term?  I think of happiness as an overall positive attitude which results from feeling grateful, satisfied, worthwhile, loved, challenged, driven, and inspired-- which means every aspect of your life plays a role in whether or not you are happy.  And the more you consider the concept, the more elusive the feeling can seem.  For instance, it is hard to feel both driven and satisfied.  To be driven is to have a goal you're working toward, to want something you do not yet have.  And to be satisfied is to be content with the way things are going; you feel good about what you already have.  Happiness seems to require a great deal of balance, optimism, and effort.

This month I read The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin.  In this book, Rubin documents a year in which she focused on actively making herself happier.  Each month she picked one aspect of her life to focus on; such aspects included energy, marriage, work, money, and mindfulness.  Then she set specific resolutions relating to each area.  On the subject of energy, for instance, her resolutions were to get to sleep earlier; exercise better; toss, restore, and organize (with regard to her cluttered material possessions); tackle a nagging task, and act more energetic.  All of these things are fairly commonsense; I think most people would agree that better exercise would give them more energy and make them feel happier.  And that's kind of how the book goes.  Most of the ideas in it are not new or surprising.  However, the book still manages to be impressive in that it has gathered all of these ideas in one place and then provided a living example of someone attempting to put them to work in her own life.   

Because Rubin's personal Happiness Project affected me, made me evaluate my own life, I have included, beginning in the following paragraph, a collection of the book's ideas and concepts I found most useful.  Perhaps you may find them useful as well.  Rubin did a ton of research for her book, so while some of the ideas are hers, many of them she is simply passing on.  That is what I, too, am doing.  Much of what is written below comes straight from her book, and some of it consists of my own elaborations.  I hope you find these ideas and reminders to be helpful in better enjoying and getting more out of your day-to-day life.

- "If you're not failing, you're not trying hard enough." 
        - Meaning: You need to challenge yourself, strive for new and greater things.  If you never fail, then you must not be taking many risks, and if you take no risks, you're not really living, are you?  You are complacent.  You're existing.  You're merely getting by.  And then time passes and you'll have nothing to show for it.  When you take risks and challenge yourself, life is slower, more interesting, and memorable.

- Stay on top of simple things: keep things clean and organized.  If a task takes five minutes or less, don't put it off.  Just get it done.  For big tasks, just do a little bit each day and they become much more manageable.  If you do these things, many of the little nagging annoyances at the back of your brain go away.  Your self-esteem rises because you're being productive and you feel in control of your life.

- Exercise frequently.  Eat less at night.  You'll feel better and look better.  There is such a thing as a natural high.  It has all the positives of a substance-related high with none of the drawbacks.

- Behavior and attitude have a reciprocal influence.
          - Meaning: Each one influences the other.  Most people recognize that if we feel happy, we will act happy.  But the opposite is also true.  Our attitudes and feelings will also change to match our behaviors.  If you act happy, you start feeling happy.  The same is true for other emotions.  If you act negative (by being sarcastic and cynical, by complaining, etc.), you start to feel more negative inside.
          When someone has a problem, they tend to dwell and focus on it, some despairingly and others in a proactive way.  However, focusing on a problem can often make it worse.  If you focus on the fact that you feel angry, you end up finding more things to be angry about.  So while you shouldn't bottle up or ignore your problems entirely, self-distraction is actually a powerful method for lessening their severity and preventing them from ruining all the good things you've got or could have going on.

- Never expect praise or appreciation.  Do things because they make YOU feel good or right.  If someone else notices, that's a bonus.  But you if you make your happiness dependent upon something you can't control like what others say about you, you will often be let down.

- Don't ever dump your negative feelings all on one person.  Yes, it's important to share with people, to get release, to bond and feel like you're not alone.  But too much negativity will bring anyone down, and if you are its source, the person you're unloading on will like you less.  Avoid complaining in general.  If it is an important topic, frame the negativity as a discussion rather than a complaint.  And if it's not important, learn to just let it go.

- Show the people you love that you love them.  Everyone else is just as insecure as you are so it is always good for them to hear you acknowledge their value to you.  Give small gifts, do favors, give compliments, make grand gestures, go out of your way.  I sometimes find myself wishing someone would do this or that for me, just show up and surprise me in some awesome way.  But when this doesn't happen, I figure I can at least do that same thing for someone else.  And it has been proven that people often feel happiest when helping others.  E.g. Even better than the feeling of laughing is the feeling of having succeeded at making someone else laugh.

- Goal attainment does not make us as happy as we think it will.  It does make us happy, but soon enough that happiness wears off, and we find new goals.  Striving toward the goals, the process of getting there, makes us at least as happy, and that happiness lasts longer because the effort is drawn out over time.  In a word, growth is a major contributor to happiness.  Someone who is at the top of their game in one sport might actually have more fun playing something at which they are of average ability because there is room for growth.  We feel good when we are improving ourselves.     

- Ask for help, and not just from anybody.  Ask people who know the topic in question.  Most people will enthusiastically help if they think they have something valuable to offer.  They'll feel good because they are proving themselves useful.  You'll feel good because you're forming a social bond and learning to succeed at something that was difficult for you.

- Make sure your career is something you enjoy because you are going to spend an awful lot of your time doing it.  If you enjoy it, it can be a source of happiness rather than a burden combating your happiness.  Many people, I think, allow themselves to be trapped in jobs they hate because they need the money or the economy is bad, or the job is easy, or they need more education for the job they really want.  But no matter your circumstances, we live in a world that is becoming more and more globally integrated, which means there is an ever-increasing variety of opportunity and choice.  Make the extra effort to figure out what you want to do, and have the courage to pursue it.  Next to sleep, we spend more time working than doing anything else.  It makes no sense for something that's such a big part of our lives to be miserable.

- A lack of feeling bad is not enough to make you happy.  You must strive to find sources of feeling good.  This is true for two reasons.  The first is that life inevitably introduces problems and obstacles.  They will always be around, so you need to find positive things to balance them out.  Secondly, even if you do manage to remove all sources of bad feeling, that just leaves you with an absence of feeling, a numbness, which in some ways is worse.  You don't even feel alive because you don't feel anything.  No, you must strive toward positive sources of feeling.

- "When I became a man, I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up." - C.S. Lewis
         
- You miss out on a lot of good if you take yourself too seriously.

- You can do anything you want, but you can't do everything you want.  Never be afraid to try something out.  But there just isn't enough time to do everything and some things just weren't meant for you.  Even if many other people find an activity valuable and satisfying, it won't make you happy if you don't find it valuable and satisfying.  Examples:
         - Things that contribute to my happiness that many people don't enjoy: singing, reading, writing, playing with kids, competition, church.
         - Things many people seem to enjoy and that I've tried to enjoy, but they just don't leave me satisfied: drinking, being a "player," watching sports.

- Connection makes us happy.  Every positive relationship contributes.  And if a lot of the people we're friends with are also friends with each other, i.e. when we have an interconnected social network, this contributes to happiness as well.  When this network is in place, each time you influence someone becomes that much more powerful because that influence may also affect several other people you know.

- Being a happy, optimistic, and cheerful person is not the "cool" thing to do.  People who act this way are often considered goofy and weird.  But who cares, if you're enjoying life more?  Plus, research shows that simply being around happy people makes other people happier.  Being around a negative person is tiring and unpleasant no matter how cool, worldly, or intelligent they appear to be. 

- Some people think, "How can I be happy with so much pain and suffering in the world?  Isn't that selfish?"
       - True, we should not be blind, deaf, or ignorant to the problems of the world.  We should acknowledge them, learn from them, and do something about them if possible.  However, there are many issues that are out of our direct control.  If you don't think you can do anything about a particular problem and you don't plan to try, then what is the point of allowing it to bring you down?  You worrying or ranting or crying or fearing is not helping anyone, and it's making your life less pleasant.  So why bother?  The time wasted being upset over something you can't control would be better used contributing positively to some area of life that you can control.  Doing something useful makes you feel worthwhile and therefore happier, and when you feel happy you have more drive, more energy, to continue reaching out and engaging the world in positive ways.  So in a way, both you and the world are better off if you have fewer worries.
       - The flip side of this is that if you have no worries it is easy to become complacent/self-satisfied and not reach out to the world at all.  The trick, as with many things, is to find a balance.  In this case it is a balance between knowing/caring about the world's issues and not letting them become personal issues.

- If you find yourself creatively blocked-off, try simply assigning yourself a production goal and forcing yourself to meet it without worrying about the outcome.  Give yourself permission to focus on quantity instead of quality for a little bit.  Write 1,000 words a day.  Write a poem a day.  Make a painting each day.  Come up with one idea every hour for an event to host.  You will at least get the creative juices flowing, and who knows?  Some of what you create might actually be good.

- Money is a means, not an end.  Money on its own, sitting in a bank account, will not make you happy, no matter how much there is.  But money well-used can lead to happiness if you are spending it on doing things that make you and others happy.  If you are using the money, then yes money can buy you some happiness because you are more able and you have more resources to more easily do the things that you love.  The only downside is that too much money can make things too easy, and you no longer value them as much because you aren't putting forth that effort toward growth.  There is no time to savor the process of improvement if you are able to jump right to the end. 

-Money is also relative.  A person who makes $40,000 but feels that they really only need $20,000 to survive comfortably is going to be happier than a person who makes $80,000 but feels that they ought to be making $100,000 based on their skills and experience.  The first person makes less but feels like they're in a situation of abundance.  The second person makes more but feels under-appreciated.  
       -A large part of happiness is in how we perceive our circumstances.  We really can't be happy unless we think we are happy.  So while external happenings do have a heavy influence on our attitude, our perceptions and ways of framing those events have just as much influence.  Remember Descartes's philosophy, "I think, therefore I am?"  He was talking about proofs of existence, but I think it applies to attitude.  This is why psychological illness is so difficult to treat.  If you think everyone is out to get you, then for you, your reality consists of a world in which everyone is actually out to get you.  The fact that this is completely illogical makes not one bit of difference on how you feel.  Conversely, if you think you enjoyed and got a lot out of a given situation, then you did enjoy and get a lot out of it.  This aspect of attitude is what makes it so frustratingly difficult to change another person's opinion-- we each determine our own "truth."  Thankfully, this concept does make it fairly simple to change our own attitudes around if we have the determination to do so.

- We've each developed certain shortcuts to decision-making, certain psychological maxims that we use every day to help us determine what to do, what has value for us, and with whom to interact.  Psychologists call these heuristics.  The writer Gretchen Rubin calls them "True Rules."  I've always thought of mine (the positive ones anyway) as The Philosophy of Zach.  Most of the time these ways of thinking are helpful in identifying our core values and in making day-to-day decisions based on those values.  But sometimes these heuristics can be misleading, inaccurate, or harmful (Example: prejudice).  It is important to be able to recognize and root out the harmful ones, and allow the useful ones to flourish within your life.
        -Examples of a few harmful heuristics I caught myself operating under this past year:
                  People in Kentucky are uneducated.            
                  Alcohol will make me feel better.
                  Most people are boring.
    These ways of thinking led me to some troubles.    The second one in particular made me do some dumb things which I regretted.  The first and third made me fail to do things I would have likes to do i.e. reaching out and interacting more with strangers/new people.
         -Examples of the positive heuristics I live by, or The Philosophy of Zach:
                  Get comfortable with being uncomfortable.
                  The difficult thing to do and the right thing to do are usually the same.
                  Love is never wasted.
                  Good things take time.  Great things happen all at once. 
                  Variety is the spice of life.
                  Yesterday is over.
                  The future does not exist.
                  Be good to yourself. 
                  Love your neighbor.
                  Thank God.
       Most of these, by the way, have existed much longer than I have so the name Philosophy of Zach in no way implies ownership of ideas.  It simply helps me relate these ideas more directly to my own identity, which then helps me better put them into practice.
        - In short, a person who is both self-aware and willing to adjust has a very good chance at becoming happier, because they can understand and admit to both their virtues and their faults.  They can have the courage to improve on their skills and work around or eliminate entirely the faults.

 I hope these concepts spark an interest in you.  If you you're happy now, may you get happier.  If you're miserable, may you find the courage and inspiration to change.  Just remember that happiness is not an independent quality.  It is an overall feeling that result from your own lifestyle choices, experiences, and perceptions.  You will not get happier by accident, by simply wanting to be happy.  You have to make sure that the major elements of your life match up with your internal values and attitudes.  You need to take steps to ensure that the person you are and the person you wish to be are the same person.

Thank you to Gretchen Rubin and her book The Happiness Project for inspiring and providing much of the content of this post.  If you have an interest in learning more about her work on this topic, visit  her blog at www.happiness-project.com.  If you want to try and start your own happiness project, which when you get down to it is simply a conscious and specific effort to improve your quality of life, check out www.happinessprojecttoolbox.com.
     

When Did You Become an Adult?

What do you want to be when you grow up?  We're all asked this when we're kids, and the answer to the 'what' part of this question often changes.  I've wanted to be an inventor, a businessman, a world traveler, a teacher, a preacher, a therapist, a director, a rock star, and a writer.  But I want to focus on the "when you grow up" part of the question, because I've heard several people much older than me say that they still don't know what they want to be when they grow up.  This dilemma begs the question, exactly when is it that we do grow up?  At what point do we become adults?  When did you go from being a girl to being a woman?  When did you stop being a boy and start being a man?  Has it happened yet?

There are the adolescent notions that you become a woman once you have your first period and that you become a man once you lose your virginity.  Thank God that our government does not use these benchmarks as a means for determining adulthood.  It'd be great if we could stop kids from thinking this way too, because it produces some harmful effects.  In the few years I've spent working with kids, I've noticed that they often wish they could hurry up and become adults already.  They try to act more mature than they are, they try things they are not yet ready for, and they despise anything they view as childish or silly.  Because of this, too many people prematurely terminate their childhoods, and that is a shame.  They stop developing their imaginations, they stop enjoying the simple beauties of the world, and (most devastatingly) they can become cynical and jaded at the worst possible point in their lives, the formative years in which we tackle the questions of who we are and what we believe in.  If during the most crucial stage of moral, intellectual, and emotional development you already feel corrupted, feel like you've lost faith or innocence or inspiration, what will the rest of your life be like?  How unpleasant and negative will things become if the foundation of your identity is twisted from the start? 

I think it best that we prolong childhood for as long as we can in ourselves and in our children.  Encourage playfulness, exploration, and wonder.  Don't allow too much responsibility to be taken on too soon.  Love interests, careers... these things can wait.  People have their entire adulthood to grapple with these things, and adulthood can last upwards of 80 years.  Childhood, however, is much more limited.    

From a legal standpoint, you're more or less an adult when you hit the age of 18.  You can purchase tobacco products and lottery tickets, sign your own medical forms, drive a car, see rated R movies, rent an apartment, and go to real prison if you mess up.  But I've met some very immature 18 year-olds.  Hell, I've met some very immature 25 year-olds.  And there are16 year-olds who have already learned to live on their own.  I consider myself an adult, and yet I still find that I view myself more like a child when interacting with an authoritative figure to whom I defer.  So the factors influencing adulthood must vary from person to person. 

Some might say that you become an adult when you start living on your own.  You have your own house, work full time, and pay your own bills.  Some people feel that they've reached adulthood once they do start that career they've been striving toward, once they've "arrived" at some goal they've had in mind.  Some feel like they're adults once the next generation is born, once they become parents, uncles, aunts, or teachers.  Some don't really feel like adults until the previous generation starts dying off and they no longer have that cushion of security, of being able to go to their own parents for help.

Responsibility is the major factor in all of these contingencies. 

I believe that the moment I became a man was when I started recognizing things that needed to be done and recognizing myself as the person who could do them, who should do them.  I don't know when this first happened; it was probably something that developed in stages.  Moving away and living on my own.  Learning to befriend the kind of people I respect and not just the people who are around. Leaving my apartment in the middle of the night to console a friend having a breakdown.  Declining dead end jobs and seeking jobs that scared the hell out of me but felt right.  Asking out the kind of people I love instead of settling for the kind of people I thought would say yes, and having the patience to wait for the first kind of person.  Remembering my nieces' birthdays.  Letting go of friendships no longer serving their function.  Maintaining the good friendships, even when it is inconvenient to do so.  Learning to cease fearing authority figures, learning to approach and engage with people I admire.  Learning to consider the source, listen when it's a source I respect, and ignore when it's not.  Taking family members to the hospital.  Being a mediator when the people I love forget that they love each other.  Waking up in the AM.  Taking the time to purchase fresh ingredients and cook a healthy meal.  Reading the Bible, however long it may take me.   Stopping at two drinks.  Making sure the guy passed out on the sidewalk is still alive.

And of course, I do try to keep the child in me alive.  I still love running through a downpour, climbing trees, playing with dogs, making immature jokes, and learning new things.  I think the best people are those who have found a comfortable balance between the pure uncorrupted delight of childhood and the ability to take responsibility for the things you have the ability to be responsible for.  That's really the major difference between immaturity and adulthood; you step up and do what's necessary because you are the one who can.

Although I am curious, dear readers.  If you would be so bold, please feel free to share the moments you first realized you had become a man or woman.  I would love to know, and it could be a valuable piece of introspection for you.  When did you become an adult? 

One Good Reason, of Many

It is for Sydney Carton that I live,
For he whom society forgets or misinterprets,
A man not cared for,
Not even by himself,
Given to the heavy nightly drink
Which drowns out partially
The heavier and constant think,
Who long ago stored ambition
On some dusty shelf.

His actions are of his own volition
Which is often dormant
But exists nonetheless,
And there is the occasional other
Who quite by accident may access
The low blue flame which still burns
One hundred leagues beneath his breast.

He is lost to all men.
He is lost to all women.
He is lost to himself,
But not so with God and with children.
It is for Sydney Carton that I live,
For fervent hope that any man,
However pained, lost, misunderstood,
Might still have it in him to do something great,
Still hold the ability to do some good.

Just After Sunset

Being a lover of a good work of literature, it is easy for me to dismiss the popular best-selling fiction authors.  These are the writers who seamlessly churn out mysteries and thrillers which are then consumed by the masses.  The side of me that is an indie-snob assumes that most  products of popular culture are, in actuality, total crap.  I don't necessarily need all the flash and intrigue that most people enjoy.  What I desire is good, strong writing with real characters and conflicts to which I can relate.  So I rarely visit the best-selling and new fiction shelves at my local book store.

But I was recently pleasantly surprised when I picked up a copy of Stephen King's Just After Sunset.  In my dislike of pop culture as well as the horror genre, I overlooked something: Stephen King is a good-ass writer. 

Just After Sunset  is a collection of thirteen short stories in which King begins by presenting fairly normal, yet extremely poignant human conflicts.  With these conflicts he relates to the reader and gets you invested in his characters.  Then he ups the ante and thrusts the characters into much more extraordinary, often surreal conflicts.  A therapy patient with a seemingly textbook case of OCD reveals the very specific way in which his compulsions are actually preventing the world from ending.  A woman dealing with the sudden death of her husband receives a call from her husband in purgatory.  A man gives a ride to deaf-mute hitchhiker and begins to vent to him about his unfaithful wife.  Then he finds out that the hitchhiker wasn't deaf at all when he shows up to return the favor.  And in my favorite story, a man is dealing with survivor's guilt because he was playing hooky from work on 9/11.  Then, possessions of his now-deceased coworkers mysteriously show up at his apartment.

There is not a single boring story in the collection, and they cater both to readers who appreciate more literary fiction as well as readers who like exciting, fantastic events that are sometimes inspiring, sometimes disturbing, and sometimes (somehow) both. 

What It's Like to Learn Otherwise

Like a hurricane inside your brain,

Like you need to act… now.

Like being left for the enemy

Who then takes a bow.

Like a kick in the nuts

Or a secret family disgrace.

Or going the whole day

With something on your face

Because no one spoke up—

Had the respect to say,

“Hey, you look stupid.”

Or like trying to look tough

After being bitch-slapped by Cupid.

It Is Difficult to Judge

A prejudicial heart—

Now there’s a place to start.

Can we part the heart from the self

So to place one or the other

On a shelf to be contemplated,

Examined, probed, and tested

Without self getting lost,

Without heart arrested?

And if we can do this,

Put such vital things on an altar

So to willfully admit

Where our faults are,

And assuming we can survive

Such a sacrifice,

Can we be altered?

Is recognition enough—

To be able to say,

“Yes this is how I think

And I think such thoughts

May damage”—

If the thought is the problem…

Can a thought’s conviction

Be weakened through more thought?

Can more be wrought

Than a self-aware heathen?

Will the bias change to match

The ideal?  Or will the value

Morph so that we feel less bad—

So that we might live with ourselves

And maybe some sisters, spouses, and brothers

Though we may lack love for all others?

How to Change the World

There is a certain kind of person who sincerely and desperately desires to have an impact on the world.  This person; for whatever reason be it spiritual, emotional, experiential, logical, empathic, or even political; has become convinced at their core level that the best way to go through life is to spend a good deal of it helping others.  This desire comes in a multitude of varieties (see following paragraphs), but essentially they all amount to the belief that we change the world by affecting change in the people around us.

For some, this desire manifests itself in social outreach.  Your Peace Corps workers, your family counselors, your Big Brothers and Big Sisters are all examples of this.  These people don’t need a lot of money.  They don’t seek recognition.  They make sacrifices of their own time, and in some cases their dignity and relative sanity as well, for the chance to improve the life of someone else even if it’s only on a small scale, even if it’s only one person affected and it takes an entire year to affect them.  Such people believe wholeheartedly and without shame that such an effect is both valuable and worthwhile.  Yet for even the most selfless person, a little recognition, a little gratitude is still desired.  Without this, it becomes easy for someone to doubt the effectiveness of their actions.

Some people believe that to truly affect change one must be in a position of power in order to do so.  These folks strive to become religious leaders, politicians, or in some cases particularly outspoken rebel activists.  They seek power and attention not for their own glory (although there are those for whom this is the aim) but for the position and opportunity to affect change on a large scale.  These people often find, once they achieve their position of power, that much of their time ends up being devoted to keeping that position of power by making relatively happy those who have influence over it, and significantly less time goes into directly improving the world on a grand scale simply because there are only so many hours in the day.  These people find that to be a successful leader in American society, one must often compromise, one must be a little less extreme than one would like, for to be extreme is to narrow your sphere of influence to only that audience which shares your extreme views while completely alienating those on the other extreme and rendering yourself a laughable cartoon to those more balanced of mind.  So in compromising, these leaders often must partially sacrifice their high ideals for the sake of accomplishing anything at all.  As time goes on, some become corrupt.  Some become discouraged.  But there are those who persevere, often going prematurely gray and developing heart conditions in the process, and they accomplish much.

There are others who believe that education is the most important instrument for social change.  These are not only your teachers, your principals, your charter school developers, but also your writers, your scholars, and your museum curators.  These people love knowledge; they value curiosity and strive to always be learning. They believe that to change a person who is set in their ways is difficult but not impossible.  Any learned behavior can be adjusted, corrected, or replaced.  But even better than that, why not just try to reach people at an early age by teaching them passionately and tirelessly while their minds are still malleable?  These people believe that crime, immorality, unhappiness, destruction, and hatred can be greatly reduced if we only train people to better understand themselves and the world.  These people remember their formative years well; they remember the stupid decisions they made as result of their own adolescent insecurities, which resulted in large part from not yet having a great deal of education or life experience.  Such people put much stock in statistics that correlate high-school dropout rates with all manner of negative social action because it seems fairly logical that if you cease all education while in a state of extreme insecurity you will continue to be insecure throughout the rest of your life because you aren’t learning anything new which will allow you to change.  And an insecure person is a volatile and potentially destructive person whereas someone who understands their place in the world (or at the least has become comfortable with the notion that their place in the world can be vague and ever-changing) is better equipped to deal with challenge and less likely to feel threatened by those whose purpose and place are much different than their own.

These lovers of knowledge sometimes find themselves in conflict between their own scholarship and the spreading of knowledge to others.  Some, often the teachers, become so fully involved in the world of education that they stop setting aside time for their own intellectual growth.  If this goes on for too long, these people can lose sight of why they love education in the first place, and at that point they cease trying to inspire, instead settling for a yearly routine dispersal of the same repetitive curriculum.  Others, often the writers and scholars, become so involved with their own academic lives, their own learning, that they forget how to truly affect others.  These people are full of valuable information and experience but end up lacking the ability or the time to effectively impart this wisdom on others in a manner that is in any way interesting.  

Those are the three most common and most effective types of change-makers.  They have different methods, different strengths and weaknesses, different values—but they all stem from the same core desire, the same need, the same purpose: to make the world better.

I once read a theory (reproduced below, from Vonnegut’s Bluebeard) that to truly change the world, you need a team.  One person cannot do it alone.   

“Most people cannot open their minds to new ideas unless a mind-opening team with a peculiar membership goes to work on them.  Otherwise life will go on exactly as before, no matter how painful, unrealistic, unjust, ludicrous, or downright dumb that life may be. 

            “The team must consist of three sorts of specialists.  Otherwise, the revolution, whether in politics or the arts or the sciences or whatever, is sure to fail.

            “The rarest of these specialists is an authentic genius—a person capable of having seemingly good ideas not in general circulation.  A genius working alone is invariably ignored as a lunatic.

            “The second sort of specialist is a lot easier to find: a highly intelligent citizen in good standing in his or her community who understands and admires the fresh ideas of the genius, and who testifies that the genius is far from mad.  A person like that working alone can only yearn out loud for changes, but fail to say what their shapes should be.

            “The third sort of specialist is a person who can explain anything, no matter how complicated, to the satisfaction of most people, no matter how stupid or pigheaded they may be.  He will say almost anything in order to be interesting and exciting.  Working alone, depending solely on his own shallow ideas, he would be regarded as being full of shit as a Christmas turkey.”

A selfish and self-centered person will not change the world except by accident.  You need to work both with others and for others in order to have any real or positive influence upon others.  This is not easy.  Everyone who tries is constantly met with challenge.  Everyone who is to succeed must face and work through their own weaknesses.  You must develop self-confidence without allowing it to become self-absorption.  You must never lose sight of your ideals, but you must also refrain from being blinded by them.  You must care immensely about what you are doing with your life, and you must also respect what your neighbor Jeff is trying to accomplish with his.  You must be able to undergo frequent criticism, evaluation, and debate; both internal and external in nature.  In order to know what needs done and how best to do it, you need to be thoughtful and knowledge-seeking in nature.  In order to actually accomplish what is needed, you need to be decisive and action-oriented.  In order to effectively work with others, you need to be open-minded and willing to compromise.

It is not an easy thing to accomplish all this.  But it is possible.  And it is in the effort of trying that most people find happiness.  When I look upon my life as I’ve lived it so far, my most treasured moments are those in which I felt I’d truly engaged the world around me.  Sometimes it was in big ways.  Sometimes it was one interaction with one person.  Sometimes I knew the person well.  Sometimes I had never met the person before and would never see them again.

But there are days that are not memorable for me.  These are the days I spent alone doing nothing.  Sure, every once in a while you need a day like this to rest and recharge.  But not that often.

So in the simplest terms, how do you go about changing the world?  Start by putting yourself out there in it.  Go places.  Meet people.  Contemplate.  Act.

The Finer Points of Bokononism

Bokononism: a religion completely fabricated by Kurt Vonnegut in his book Cat's Cradle.  To my knowledge there are no actual practicers of this religion; and yet it has some great ideas.  The best works of fiction are the ones that leave a lasting impression, that inspire you to think differently about life.  And Bokononism did this for me, so I'd like to share some of its principles; this will be a rare blog post in which most of what I write is not my own idea.

The central premise of the religion is the idea that God is working in each of us in ways that we will never understand.  Nonetheless each of us has an important role to play.  And none of is is alone; we are all part of a karass, which is a team of people working unknowingly together to achieve God's purposes.  A karass ignores the typical boundaries of nation, institution, organization, family, and class.  So if you find your life tangled up with somebody else's for no logical reason, that person might be a member of your karass.

"Oh a sleeping drunkard
Up in Central Park,
And a lion-hunter
In the jungle dark,
And a Chinese dentist,
And a British queen--
All fit together in the same machine.
Nice, nice, very nice;
Nice, nice, very nice;
Nice, nice, very nice;
So many different people
In the same device."

There are other people, ones not in your karass, whose purpose in your life is to steer you away from a given course of action.  For instance, there is a nihilist in the story who completely destroys the narrator's apartment and kills his cat.  It was this man's purpose to forever disenchant the narrator with notions of nihilism.

A key ritual of Bokononism is called Boko-maru, or the intermingling of souls.  It is achieved when two people place the soles of their bare feet against each other's and share an intimate, peaceful moment in this position.  It is not sexual in any way, yet creates a similar emotional intimacy through physical connection.  People form bonds simply by sharing a quiet moment together, embracing in a unique way.

The last rites of the religion talk in large part about God's creation of man from mud, speaking of God's great power and man's comparative lowliness in beautifully humble terms.  My favorite part: "The only way I can feel the least bit important is to think of all the mud that didn't even get to sit up and look around.  I got so much, and most mud got so little."

It should be noted that several of the tenets of Bokononism are not included here because many are cynical, and therefore not particularly useful in my mind.  Most of these deal with larger matters such as affairs of state.  Seeing as the nation-state that practices the religion in the story is a complete failure, these tenets strike me as rather bad ideas.

Yet there are enough good ideas to merit me wanting to share them with those who would rather not read a whole book but don't mind reading my occasional 1-page posts.  So here are a few more quotes and ideas that derive from Bokononism:

"She was a fool and so am I and so is anyone who thinks he sees what God is doing."

"Peculiar travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God."

How to answer yes to an inquiry about yourself: "That happiness is mine."
Example:   Q: "Are you Zach Peters?!"
                 A: "That happiness is mine."

To want all of somebody's love is bad.  Love is meant to be shared and spread.

"Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before.  He is full of murderous resentment of people who are ignorant without having come by their ignorance the hard way."

"Think of what a paradise this world would be if men were kind and wise."

Replaced

A leaf falls away and turns brown,
Then is forced to watch later from the ground
As green sprouts again in Spring,
Which is now a separate thing.

A grandparent goes to a nursing home
Which his family finds depressing;
The family comes round less and less
Preferring company with more blessings.

A friend moves away and the phone calls decrease.
Then you're slipped a thirty day notice
When new tenants sign a lease.

A kid gets an Xbox for his birthday
And his teddy bear lays forgotten

While many fabrics are rendered less popular
By the practicality of cotton,.

A lover's lover loves another.

A son takes a wife, leaves his mother.

A girl goes away to college
Then comes back for Thanksgiving,
Then stumbles on the knowledge
That her friends have new friends,
New manners of living.

Oh, what an uncertain longing we face
When we find that we have been replaced.

Here's to the Mothers

Thanks
For getting the wrinkles out of my clothes,
For finding the right ointment for the zits on my nose,
For lifting me up
And not giving up,
For carrying me around 9 months,
For meeting my needs and some of my wants,
For buying me my first suit
While calling me handsome-- never cute,
For teaching me to love books,
For eating the meals I cook,
For keeping a roof up over my head,
May you feel fully alive and never dead,
Because you deserve to
And because I love you,
Here's to you, mothers,
From me, my sisters, and my brothers.
Our gratefulness is expressed best
Not here in rhyming couplets
And not fully anywhere,
But we're grateful nonetheless.
Thanks for being there.

The Root of All Evil

Original sin.  Self-interest.  Money.  Satan.  Hearts of Darkness.  There are a few things attributed as being evil's source, but they all trace back to mankind.  "They're only as good as the world allows them to be," says the Joker in The Dark Knight, "You'll see.  When the chips are down, these... these civilized people, they'll eat each other."

Or there's Simon in Lord of the Flies.  The children of the novel, stranded on an island, start believing in  a monstrous beast that lives out in the jungle.  But Simon asks, What if the beast is us?  And sure enough every bad thing that happens in the novel is caused by the children themselves.  Simon has a fantastic (in the literary sense) conversation with a representative of this beast, who says, "You knew, didn't you?  I'm part of you?  Close, close, close!  I'm the reason why it's no go?  Why things are what they are?"

I do believe that evil comes from mankind.  However, does that make mankind evil?  I do not believe so.  Mankind produces evil, but we produce good too.  After all, the people stuck on the ferries in The Dark Knight choose to risk their own lives rather than sacrifice the lives of others.  And there are characters in Lord of the Flies that try to act for the common good even when it isn't fashionable and even when ridiculed, betrayed, and abandoned by others.

There are people who have children and abandon them.  But there are also people who devote the better part of their lives to raising their children.  And there are people with no children of their own who still try to teach and improve the children of others.  There are people who will kill for 100 dollars.  But there are also people who save lives for 100 dollars or sometimes more or sometimes less or sometimes nothing at all.  There are people who use other people like objects... to be disposed of as soon as they're no longer useful.  But there are others who make an effort to show love every day to those they care about.  And there are people who try to love those they don't even know.

We are not inherently good or bad.  It is a choice we make.  And sure, there are many circumstances out of the individual's control (poverty, international relations, natural disaster, tragic accidents, and the positive or negative actions of those around us) that might influence how a person acts, but when it comes down to it we all have a choice to do good or to do evil.  Some do good.  Some do evil.  Most do a bit of both.  But no matter how hard or easy life may seem, there is always a choice.

Dissatisfied Man Finds Hope Online

There is a certain anonymous dating website that caters to people already in relationships who are looking for something on the side.  No names, no pictures.  Just people who are bored and require a change.

Bill, who had been married 10 years, had started to resent the predictability of his wife Nancy.  She never surprised him anymore.  And worse, he never seemed able to surprise her.  Even if he did the most insanely idiotic and damaging thing, like the time he got into a barroom brawl defending the honor of a woman that was not her—even then Nancy forgave him and found something positive to look at. 

“If you were willing to stand up for a total stranger, I can only imagine what you’d do for me,” she told him later that night.

It made him sick.  Show a little anger, he wanted to say.   I was attracted to her!  That’s why I defended her!   But he didn’t say that.  Instead the two of them made love and then Nancy went to sleep.  Bill stayed up a while thinking about the what ifs of life.

A month later he joined the dating website.  Just to see what else is out there, he told himself.  To prove to myself that I have it better than I think I do.

And for a week or so, the site did exactly that.  The profiles all fit into one of two categories.  Half of them were overly shallow, obvious advertisements for sex with no strings attached.  No relationship desired.  The other half of them were involved, detailed profiles that described all of the women’s hobbies, desires, wants, needs, aspirations, and shortcomings.  These women were openly unhappy in their current relationships and were just dying to find a reason to leave, but they also seemed cautious about actually agreeing to meet up with anyone from the site.  Bill found himself despising them all.  All the women in both categories.  Sure, he messaged a few of them.  But it didn’t even feel like communicating with real people.  It felt like a chat room from the 1990s where people could say whatever they wanted because it wasn’t the real world and there were no repercussions.  Then Bill found himself despising himself for considering cheating on Nancy for these chat room women. 

But his wife just kept bothering him, killing him with her kindness.  What happened to the naughty girl that used to manipulate her roommates into all being out of house at the same time so he could come over?  What happened to the girl who used to go out to the balcony and throw water balloons at pedestrians?  What happened to the girl with the big brown eyes with that mysterious glint and the untamable spirit?  What happened to the girl he married, and who is this woman that lives in his house and does anything he asks without ever needing recompense?  Of course, he never asked her any of these questions.  Nancy seemed so willing to please him.  How could he tell her that despite all her efforts he was dissatisfied?  How could he tell her that he wanted more?

So Bill gave the website one last try.  He was up half the night. He drank a six-pack and sent women message after message with no replies.  He walked to the corner store and bought another six-pack.  Then something happened.  When he was halfway through his 9^th beer, he found someone real.  Her profile read like this:

I love my husband, but lately something just seems to be missing.  There is no spark anymore.  We go out, but mostly for the change of scenery, not because we really care for the night’s activity.  Neither of us is trying to impress the other anymore.  It’s like we succeeded.  We got married.  Now what?  It’s like we don’t know what the next step is.  And we haven’t known for years.  I just feel stuck, but I try to be as loving a wife as I can.  My husband seems perfectly fine.  He never complains.  He tells me I’m beautiful.  But he really doesn’t say much beyond that.  What happened to the boy who used to stay up all night making inquiries with me about what made people tick, about what made the world turn?  What happened to the boy who was not afraid to criticize me for selfishness, who inspired me to care more about the people around me?  Who is this man that comes home and eats the food that I make then stoically heads to bedroom to perform his husbandly duties?  When did our relationship become a duty?  What happened to the fire?  I miss the fire.  I’m burning for a change.  If you think you’ve got the heat, then message me.

Bill spent the next week messaging this woman.  Sometimes they’d exchange several messages in the same day.  They really seemed to hit it off.  They shared almost all of their interests.  They liked the same music.  They’d been to many of the same places.  They had the same pet peeves.  And most importantly, they both craved a steamy romantic encounter that would make them feel alive again.  The things this woman wanted to do behind closed doors… Bill hadn’t been this turned on in years.  He particularly loved this one idea involving ropes, ice cubes, and an entire bed covered in feathers.  He almost couldn’t wait to try it—he even thought about asking Nancy, but couldn’t figure out how to begin.  In the end he decided against it.  He cared about her too much, and what if she took the suggestion as a sign that the sex they’d been having wasn’t good enough?

No, instead Bill set up a date with the online woman.  She agreed to meet him at a café in the next town so they wouldn’t chance running into their respective spouses.  He told her he’d be the mustachioed man reading a newspaper and drinking espresso.  She said she was a brunette and she’d be wearing a purple dress and heels.

Bill spent the better part of the day trying to decide whether or no to wear cologne, then which type of cologne to wear.  Once deciding, he experienced a brief surge of confidence before the question of whether or not to bring a condom popped into his head.  He didn’t know how these online dates worked.  Is the person looking for sex right away?  Does she just want to talk first and make sure I’m not a serial killer?  What if she doesn’t want sex right away but she sees the condom in my wallet when I go to pay and then she thinks that I’m shallow and too assuming, then ends it right there?

In the end, he decided that based on their messaging, sex was likely.  So he brought a few condoms, but left them in the car on the off chance that he was wrong.  He showed up to the café early, probably a little too early for his own good.  He downed a few espressos in short time and was getting jittery.  He tried to calm himself by focusing on the positives, on the potential of this woman.  She seemed perfect after all.  She was having the same problems.  She had the same interests.  He loved brunettes.  She had a wild imagination.  And all of the things that had been bothering him—he felt comfortable talking about them with her.  She gave him hope.  Hope that even well intro adulthood there could still be some magic, some fire in life.  One could still, after 35 years of living still have interesting conversation, still be excited for the future, still find novel outlooks on life in people that haven’t been entirely jaded and ruined.  Bill had just about made up his mind that if this woman was even remotely good-looking, his life was about to get a whole lot better.  It would be more complicated, sure, and laced with guilt, but at least he’d feel alive.  He and this woman would save each other from their failing marriages and increasingly dreary lives. 

“We will save each other, I swear it,” he whispered to himself.

Then the little bell rang on the front door of the café, and in walked Nancy in a purple dress.