Flourishing in conjunction with Fate
I read two books over Christmas break. One was a series of short stories by Ted Chiang. I highly recommend it. Each was a provocative idea that he fleshed out in big-idea format. One of them, "The Story of Your Life", became the movie "Arrival". A couple of others would be good foundations for movies, too: he creates a world but leaves it largely unexplored in the short stories. I wanted more of nearly all of them.
The central idea in "Arrival" is the concept that beings that can see in four dimensions start something knowing the ending at the same time. Think about our three dimensional journeys: we know where we're at, we program our destination into Waze and off we go. We know the route. We know the sorrows we'll find along the way (traffic on 495) and the challenges (freezing rain on Route 2) and who our companions will be (the ones that entered the car with us.) We know all of this in advance and we take the good with the bad and start our engines. In this story the woman knows the entire story of her daughter's life before the daughter is ever born. The good, the bad, the meh. She doesn't diverge from the route even though she could because the entirety is what she signed up for. There's a moment in the short story where she is in a store and sees a bowl. She remembers the bowl crashing down on her daughter's head from a counter in roughly four years from now. She remembers the way she reflexively tried to catch the bowl as it was falling. She buys it with the same reflex, nothing intellectual about it. She wants the bowl, it's for sale, she's shopping: she buys it. There is no moment where her future memories can/would change her behavior.
In another post I take this concept a bit further, but right now I wanted to just flesh it out for contemplation. Is this "fate"? Is this life in four dimensions? Is this Buddhist acceptance and non-attachment? I'm not sure, but I want to meditate on it further.
The other book requires quite a LOT of integration. "Flourish" by Martin Seligman talks about the science of positive psychology. Basically, he has figured out how to be happy. It's a bit like discovering that you'll be in better shape and live longer if you exercise with resistance training and cardiovascular training. You can train yourself to be an optimist, more emotionally resilient, and to be happier. The trick is to train to improve your PERMA (Positive emotions, Engagement, positive Relationships, Meaning, and Accomplishment.) https://www.authentichappiness.sas.upenn.edu/learn
There is a ton of stuff in that book. So much so that I think I'll need to reread it. For example, although I've heard of PTSD, I'd never heard of Post-Traumatic Growth. That's, essentially, the concept that "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger" and it's a lot more common in real life than PTSD. I didn't know this, but it's obvious once they point it out: a lot of people experience a really traumatic experience and IMPROVE their lives afterwards. They use what they learned to make the changes necessary so that doesn't trouble them again, or they learn something about themselves that helps them on their future journeys. It's heady stuff.
I'm interested in the Master Resilience Training. It looks fabulous. I think, instead of vowing to lose weight in 2017 I'll vow to train to be happier in 2017.
The central idea in "Arrival" is the concept that beings that can see in four dimensions start something knowing the ending at the same time. Think about our three dimensional journeys: we know where we're at, we program our destination into Waze and off we go. We know the route. We know the sorrows we'll find along the way (traffic on 495) and the challenges (freezing rain on Route 2) and who our companions will be (the ones that entered the car with us.) We know all of this in advance and we take the good with the bad and start our engines. In this story the woman knows the entire story of her daughter's life before the daughter is ever born. The good, the bad, the meh. She doesn't diverge from the route even though she could because the entirety is what she signed up for. There's a moment in the short story where she is in a store and sees a bowl. She remembers the bowl crashing down on her daughter's head from a counter in roughly four years from now. She remembers the way she reflexively tried to catch the bowl as it was falling. She buys it with the same reflex, nothing intellectual about it. She wants the bowl, it's for sale, she's shopping: she buys it. There is no moment where her future memories can/would change her behavior.
In another post I take this concept a bit further, but right now I wanted to just flesh it out for contemplation. Is this "fate"? Is this life in four dimensions? Is this Buddhist acceptance and non-attachment? I'm not sure, but I want to meditate on it further.
The other book requires quite a LOT of integration. "Flourish" by Martin Seligman talks about the science of positive psychology. Basically, he has figured out how to be happy. It's a bit like discovering that you'll be in better shape and live longer if you exercise with resistance training and cardiovascular training. You can train yourself to be an optimist, more emotionally resilient, and to be happier. The trick is to train to improve your PERMA (Positive emotions, Engagement, positive Relationships, Meaning, and Accomplishment.) https://www.authentichappiness.sas.upenn.edu/learn
There is a ton of stuff in that book. So much so that I think I'll need to reread it. For example, although I've heard of PTSD, I'd never heard of Post-Traumatic Growth. That's, essentially, the concept that "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger" and it's a lot more common in real life than PTSD. I didn't know this, but it's obvious once they point it out: a lot of people experience a really traumatic experience and IMPROVE their lives afterwards. They use what they learned to make the changes necessary so that doesn't trouble them again, or they learn something about themselves that helps them on their future journeys. It's heady stuff.
I'm interested in the Master Resilience Training. It looks fabulous. I think, instead of vowing to lose weight in 2017 I'll vow to train to be happier in 2017.