Happiness
'dicea posted this Single Dad Laughing article link to FB today, not the first person to hit up this link but simply the person who jogged my memory about finally making time to read this article.
Two years ago on his birthday, my then-partner asked me why I wasn't happy, and while I had a lot of reasons at the time, and a lot of thoughts thereafter, and did a lot of rooting around (or wallowing around, depending on the day), most of it boiled down to some very simple principles, all of which are touched on in this article. I wasn't looking at hard truths or confronting my biggest demons; I didn't truly understand what they were. And because of that, I was stuck in a self-perpetuating cycle of self-ism that would eventually, in combination with a bunch of other factors such as my partner's unconscious tendencies to enable my ongoing issues just as I enabled his, lead to some unpleasant catastrophic adjustments in my life.
I really like what SDL has to say about things that can lead to personal happiness; these are all aspects rooted in ourselves rather than other people, and he makes no bones about how much work any one of these revelations proved to be. I'm especially pleased to note that there isn't a single item on this list that I'm not already aware of, and at least poking at if not actually grappling with as part of my "Choose differently, every damned day" mandate for 2012/2013. The parts about facing truths and leaving behind the things we have long held to be truths (that are really other people's applied values we took as gospel without actually looking at in our own terms) is perhaps the hardest, ongoing part of the process. Letting go of those self-perceptions leads to a kind of groundless that can make it very difficult to make life be more about other people and what we give back to the world (as opposed to expecting the world to take care of us) - fear of the unknown more often leads to grasping at and clinging to anything that even remotely looks like security, even if it's just particular kinds of call-and-response behaviours designed to remind us we're not alone out here in the groundless darkness (a particular foible of mine, personally).
Tibetan Buddhism speaks frequently to the notion of "uncovering the authentic self", the "sanity we are born with" (as Chogyam Trungpa puts it). Yet in western society, we talk of "pursuing happiness" as if it is something external to ourselves, something at a distance to ourselves that is always moving in a way that requires us to chase after it, the way a fox chases after a rabbit. I have begun to suspect that while there are always external factors that can add to or detract from our degree of happiness in any given moment, it is our ability to be happy that is intrinsically central to our well-being, and we as a culture have piled so many external values on what happiness is, or is supposed to be, that we lose sight of our own native ability to *be* happy. Martin Seligman, one of the pioneers of positive psychology, even started hedging his bets around happiness by redefining what he feels is the central human ability to *flourish* as being something apart from "being happy" (I haven't finished reading his books yet; I'll get back to that explanation when I feel like I better understand what he's talking about).
SDL's Dan and I disagree a little on the idea of facing demons and putting them behind us; and maybe it's more a case of differing lexicon than disagreement. He identifies guilt for specific actions as being demons to face down and vanquish; in my world, demons are more the programmed behavioural patterns that may or may not ever truly go away, intermeshed as they are at a near-atomic level with deeply-held values we think we must sustain in order to maintain our self-impressions. I can forgive myself for specific actions but it's much harder to grapple with the pervasive valuations tied to what are known *patterns*. They are similar, but I think different, issues and approaches. One can easily forgive a tree for blocking the path, but it's harder
to forgive an entire forest for blocking the countryside. One can move a single fallen tree; one has to learn how to move through the forest.
By the same token, I always have a little trouble with "accept who you are"-type admonishments. One of the things I have come to accept about myself is that I am, as others have noted, "relentlessly self-discovering", even if, like all archaeological projects, sometimes the digging around is unproductive or in the wrong place. Part of that self-discovery process, however, lies at odds with the idea of just "accepting things as they are". I don't know what about me can change, and what cannot, or what can change with short-term concentrated efforts and what will only change will gradual evolutionary pacing. In recent years I have come to question everything; sometimes it's an overlay of paranoia rooted in my own issues with trust and security, and sometimes it's more of the "well, THAT didn't work, I wonder what I should try NEXT" kind of questioning. Maybe what I need to do is just accept that self-questioning *IS* the who-I-am aspect I need to work on accepting.
Oooo, I just *LOVE* self-referential philosophy. It's so meta, or something...
The article is a good read. Expand all the sections, he's got some good articulations for common places where good people fall down on themselves. These are all good points to bear in mind, even if an 11 point list seems like a facile way of addressing what ultimately becomes the work of a lifetime to confront and investigate and deal with from there.
This entry was originally posted at http://much-ado.dreamwidth.org/4581372.html. Please comment there using OpenID.
Two years ago on his birthday, my then-partner asked me why I wasn't happy, and while I had a lot of reasons at the time, and a lot of thoughts thereafter, and did a lot of rooting around (or wallowing around, depending on the day), most of it boiled down to some very simple principles, all of which are touched on in this article. I wasn't looking at hard truths or confronting my biggest demons; I didn't truly understand what they were. And because of that, I was stuck in a self-perpetuating cycle of self-ism that would eventually, in combination with a bunch of other factors such as my partner's unconscious tendencies to enable my ongoing issues just as I enabled his, lead to some unpleasant catastrophic adjustments in my life.
I really like what SDL has to say about things that can lead to personal happiness; these are all aspects rooted in ourselves rather than other people, and he makes no bones about how much work any one of these revelations proved to be. I'm especially pleased to note that there isn't a single item on this list that I'm not already aware of, and at least poking at if not actually grappling with as part of my "Choose differently, every damned day" mandate for 2012/2013. The parts about facing truths and leaving behind the things we have long held to be truths (that are really other people's applied values we took as gospel without actually looking at in our own terms) is perhaps the hardest, ongoing part of the process. Letting go of those self-perceptions leads to a kind of groundless that can make it very difficult to make life be more about other people and what we give back to the world (as opposed to expecting the world to take care of us) - fear of the unknown more often leads to grasping at and clinging to anything that even remotely looks like security, even if it's just particular kinds of call-and-response behaviours designed to remind us we're not alone out here in the groundless darkness (a particular foible of mine, personally).
Tibetan Buddhism speaks frequently to the notion of "uncovering the authentic self", the "sanity we are born with" (as Chogyam Trungpa puts it). Yet in western society, we talk of "pursuing happiness" as if it is something external to ourselves, something at a distance to ourselves that is always moving in a way that requires us to chase after it, the way a fox chases after a rabbit. I have begun to suspect that while there are always external factors that can add to or detract from our degree of happiness in any given moment, it is our ability to be happy that is intrinsically central to our well-being, and we as a culture have piled so many external values on what happiness is, or is supposed to be, that we lose sight of our own native ability to *be* happy. Martin Seligman, one of the pioneers of positive psychology, even started hedging his bets around happiness by redefining what he feels is the central human ability to *flourish* as being something apart from "being happy" (I haven't finished reading his books yet; I'll get back to that explanation when I feel like I better understand what he's talking about).
SDL's Dan and I disagree a little on the idea of facing demons and putting them behind us; and maybe it's more a case of differing lexicon than disagreement. He identifies guilt for specific actions as being demons to face down and vanquish; in my world, demons are more the programmed behavioural patterns that may or may not ever truly go away, intermeshed as they are at a near-atomic level with deeply-held values we think we must sustain in order to maintain our self-impressions. I can forgive myself for specific actions but it's much harder to grapple with the pervasive valuations tied to what are known *patterns*. They are similar, but I think different, issues and approaches. One can easily forgive a tree for blocking the path, but it's harder
to forgive an entire forest for blocking the countryside. One can move a single fallen tree; one has to learn how to move through the forest.
By the same token, I always have a little trouble with "accept who you are"-type admonishments. One of the things I have come to accept about myself is that I am, as others have noted, "relentlessly self-discovering", even if, like all archaeological projects, sometimes the digging around is unproductive or in the wrong place. Part of that self-discovery process, however, lies at odds with the idea of just "accepting things as they are". I don't know what about me can change, and what cannot, or what can change with short-term concentrated efforts and what will only change will gradual evolutionary pacing. In recent years I have come to question everything; sometimes it's an overlay of paranoia rooted in my own issues with trust and security, and sometimes it's more of the "well, THAT didn't work, I wonder what I should try NEXT" kind of questioning. Maybe what I need to do is just accept that self-questioning *IS* the who-I-am aspect I need to work on accepting.
Oooo, I just *LOVE* self-referential philosophy. It's so meta, or something...
The article is a good read. Expand all the sections, he's got some good articulations for common places where good people fall down on themselves. These are all good points to bear in mind, even if an 11 point list seems like a facile way of addressing what ultimately becomes the work of a lifetime to confront and investigate and deal with from there.
This entry was originally posted at http://much-ado.dreamwidth.org/4581372.html. Please comment there using OpenID.