It's Halloween and I'm not spazzed out of my mind on sugar. This demands a lifestyle reevaluation, I think.
So anyway, this weekend in the airport I was looking for a new book to read. I picked up one called the Happiness Project. When I read the back, it told me it was about a woman who realized she had “everything” but was still not happy. And so she set out to spend a year working on understanding why that was and how she could change it.
I didn’t buy it—I suspected I’d have the same trouble with it I did with Eat Pray Love, which was that by about page 200 I wanted to throw the book at Elizabeth Gilbert and scream, “STOP THINKING ABOUT YOUR FRIGGIN’ SELF!!! GET A FRIGGIN’ LIFE!!!” That was about the page when she spent a paragraph describing how her new lover described how she was during their first time having sex. In the first place, EWWWW. In the second place, I’m all for self-empowerment and self-discovery, and clearly I don’t have a leg to stand on when it comes to the public displays of navel-gazing, but it all does make me really uncomfortable. I often think we have way too much time to think. And to then get so wrapped up in existential stuff that we lose track of all sense of perspective.
Don’t worry, I’m not complaining about having time to think. Being able to sit alone in my comfortable living room and work through existential philosophical thoughts in my blog or my fiction (which who knows, someone may someday get to see) is one of my favorite things. I just worry that having all this luxury of contemplation of the higher plane can have negative consequences—namely, the forgetting of the fact that it is luxury.
According to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, humans are incapable of worrying about things like philosophy until they have their basic requirements for survival met—air, water, food, shelter. If this is true, and I feel it is in at least some ways, then those of us who are around to worry about whether or not we are being our “best selves” or “living our best truths” or whatever else self-help will tell you to fixate on are already very lucky. Take the author of the Happiness Project. She was an employed married mother living above the poverty line. Again, I didn’t read the book, so I won’t use her as an example, but she represents many of the people we interact with everyday. We are fundamentally lucky people.
I thought of this again today at work. I run three art classes a week to work on fine motor skills. Today in one of them I was helping a 12-year-old boy named R. R has very severe quadriplegic cerebral palsy. He can’t talk or control his bladder. He has very low muscle tone—if you support his body weight in upright he can bring his legs forward to walk, but he cannot do anything as simple as sit up independently. His arm movements typically look like flails, even when they are voluntary, which they aren’t, always. He needs someone to do basically everything for him. The extra sad part is, he is aware. He’s very smart—he’s got an intellectually functioning brain in a physically dysfunctional body.
--Side note—I always really wish I could spend some time in the brain of each one of my kids—how do they see the world? What does life seem like to them? Some of them aren’t totally aware, so it’d be interesting to see what they did process—I’d be fascinated to feel what sensory defensiveness feels like. Or if they are “with it,” what kind of emotions do they have? To what extent are they bitter, or happy, or resigned? I mean, heck, I’d like time in ANYONE’s brain, everyone’s so different, but it’s my students who I really wish I had the chance to see. Anyhoo, back to the main point—
So R loves to paint. Thinking of him, I’d organized a craft where we would fingerpaint paper plates and cut construction paper legs to make a Halloween spider (it was really cute, trust me). One of the classroom aides held R’s plate for him so he wouldn’t knock it away, and I held his hand so he could bring it to the paper. My God, you guys. If you could have seen him. He was so focused. The look of intent on his face as he fought to keep his arm from flailing, the determination and patience he had to try to move his hand in the way he wanted to make his marks on his paper—that kind of moment is both uplifting and haunting. How, I wondered as I tried to strike the balance between holding him steady and holding him back, could I—so far up on Maslow’s hierarchy—watch him paint and then walk away and start wondering how I could make myself “happier?”
It’d be nice, wouldn’t it? If gratitude was the sole key to happiness. If all we had to do to be completely fulfilled was to remember what we could have, or not have, if listing all the ways we were blessed automatically made us complete. But it doesn’t work that way. For one thing, it is almost impossible to make that feeling last. When that woman almost hit me by cutting me off in traffic and making me miss a light (grrr commuting), do you think I thought, oh, that’s fine, my hands work well enough for me to drive, I can afford to buy gas, and I’m at peace? Hell no. I thought, and said, cause I talk to myself in the car, GodDAMMIT this is annoying, people SUCK, I want to go home, etc etc. Maybe I’m just a whiner, and I know I have some road rage issues, but I don’t think most of us find it possible to walk around our lives and react to every annoyance with a calm sense of gratitude for what we’re NOT dealing with. For another thing, we are simply programmed to want more. Our brains are capable of complicated thoughts and the drive to go further, to do more, to know more, etc etc, is innate. It’s a fundamental piece of human nature to not just rest on what is but to wonder—and work towards—what could be.
So I guess I feel that books like the Happiness Project are just a natural extension of what human nature can be when we’re fundamentally blessed. I just think that, as the author very well may say, a huge part of “happiness” is remembering those blessings. And despite the individualistic bent of our culture (using this line of thought, one could argue Jersey Shore is a natural extension of human nature, and isn’t THAT a terrifying concept), I don’t think that navel-gazing is equivalent to happiness. I don’t think it’s all about self, in fact, when we focus too much on our own selves, it’s a bad thing. It’s so easy to lose perspective, but it’s so important not to.
Ok, preaching over. Hope your Monday made you happy! Candy helps with that... Lol. Much love.
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