Facebook survey
Posted on | July 1, 2009 | 2 Comments
Just the other day I noticed, yet again, that people have a way of being resentful when others have some sort of mild success. I posted this comment on facebook and was interested to note that many people felt the same way. In fact a LOT of people felt the same way.
So why is it that instead of being happy for someone else’s success we find that others tend to want to criticize, belittle, and reduce their achievement? That’s not the popular attitude as projected by Hollywood. There if one does something good and praiseworthy everyone jumps up and down and celebrates and is happy. That’s Hollywood. In the real world one is much more likely to run into false smiles and waves of negativity. ‘Huh,’ goes the refrain, ‘that’s not so great. I coulda done that…’
A variant on this is the subtle way people can look down on success. People can be happy for what you achieve, as long as they can say in the next breath that of course you didn’t get rich doing it (for example), or that you suffered in some other real or imagined way. Here’s an example: ‘Van Gogh was a genius, but of course, mentally terribly tortured…’ Is that why we like his work? Because he was an artistic success who reassured us that success wasn’t worth it at that price - which in turn excuses our own lack of successes?
What we have here, my friends, are excuses for mediocrity; those consoling attitudes we all, to some extent, are inclined to preserve, and if we hold on to them they stop us from having to even try for real success, or personal actualization.
This is Orphan culture. It’s time to move beyond it.
Let us be happy for others’ successes and even for their attempts at success. Let us revel in the fact that people are doing their best to make personal progress. And let’s also make sure we don’t accept any excuses for our own lack of motivation.
The Best Laid Plans
Posted on | June 28, 2009 | 1 Comment
Today I was determined to be serious and work hard. It made sense; plus I’d had a couple of rather serious conversations over the previous day, about friends who were hurting for various reasons. The weather cooperated by being miserable, drizzling when it wasn’t actually raining. Yes, I was going to do some real work.
And somehow happiness kept breaking into my day. Everything from the goldfinch clowning in the springy new shoots of the tree, to the way a neighbor’s dog was just so full of life and bounce, to the bees sipping at the clover and tumbling around in their enthusiasm. Everything combined to make me smile. The garden shop with fantastic petunias at $3 each - and I had only the vaguest notion what a petunia was before these velvety purple things hijacked me. Now I own a couple.
And you know what? I think I got the work done I needed to, today, without even trying.
Sculpture
Posted on | June 27, 2009 | No Comments
These two images are of ‘Ozymandias’, currently on show in the De Cordova Museum, Lincoln, MA - one of the finest modern art museums in this North East Corner of the US. As you can see the sculptures are huge - that’s the artist Douglas Kornfeld leaning up against it. Ozymandias? Well, you may recall the poem by Coleridge, in which a traveler comes across a huge fragment of a statue in the desert and this leads him to speculate on the fall of nations, the passing of the arrogance of power, and the encroachment of devastation that ultimately follows all such hubris. In our time of massive abuse of power in many nations, of the degradation of our environment by mega-companies, and increased desertification caused by greed - - well I’m sure you can see the connection.
It’s a large male figure sinking? Rising? Stuck in the earth. It’s a tombstone to the male-thinking mindset that has got us into this mess. And it’s beautiful.
Motorcycle Maintenance
Posted on | June 25, 2009 | 2 Comments
Perhaps this is not the first thing that springs to your mind when you read this blog - so let me explain. A dear friend of mine, a fellow motorcyclist, has spent many years now restoring a splendid vintage bike. It is now close to being perfect - with some discrete modern updates - and one of the plans was to take it on a long road tour.
Last week his back ‘went out’. He’s been diagnosed with various disc ailments - all of which translate into two main categories: (1) painful, and (2) not likely to get better.
Over the past few years I’ve been enthusiastically discussing his restoration project with him, and all that time the sands of eternity have been trickling through the hour glass.
Is there a lesson here? Undoubtedly. It seems we spent so long talking, getting caught in the details of this upcoming adventure, that the adventure itself didn’t happen. And now it may be a lot harder to make it happen without severe pain - and where’s the sense in that?
Of course, skeptic that I am, I rarely accept right away the grim diagnoses that the medical establishment throws at me or anyone else. I’ve managed to get better from enough ‘incurable’ ailments over the years to let me realize that one should never, ever, give in to hopelessness. Perhaps this one of one the lessons that has to be revisited. And perhaps there’s a bigger one.
Cherish each moment. And don’t postpone paradise.
Iran’s lessons
Posted on | June 23, 2009 | No Comments
Plenty has been said about Iran, and I can only say that there are many angry blogs offering solutions, and making demands, and calling names.
I won’t be doing that. I’ll observe, though, that the US is now in a strange place. We, in the US, backed Saddam Hussein all those years before we attacked him, and at that time we helped to fund his war against Iran. This was because we still backed the deposed Shah, and so the enemy of our enemy was our friend. Now, that is a realm of strange double-speak, obviously, but it gets worse.
The protesters in Iran, some of them at least, seem to be asking for some sort of US intervention. Yet we can’t do that without immediately causing a huge backlash of suspicion against the US, and against anyone who wants to side with Iran’s former ‘enemies’ - the ‘great satan’ - as we are called.
We’re in the position of a person who has a life vest, who is being asked to throw it, knowing that doing so will result in the struggling swimmer being dragged to shore by others and killed, whereupon the killers will turn on us.
This didn’t have to be this way. This no-win situation for the protesters, and for us, could have been very different if the US had acted honorably, decently, and with humanity many years ago when we first upset a precarious emerging democratic country and installed the Shah.
The lesson is one for all of us. Behave decently and respectfully all the time, for we never know what the future may hold.
The Words we use rob us of Peace
Posted on | June 17, 2009 | No Comments
The other day I was talking to a neighbor, who is rather well off, and the talk turned to real estate. Before too long I heard her say, “Well, we’re just about keeping or heads above water.” I found this to be an interesting cliche´. And I didn’t believe it to be true. She was not suffering from any real economic threat. So I suggested to her that her word choice was not helping her peace of mind.
This stopped her tirade about the expenses of remodeling her second home.
Yes, I went on. Think of it this way; If one struggles, literally, to keep one’s head above water then you’ll see that this quickly becomes exhausting. Any swimmer knows that. What we have to do is let the water support us. It will hold you up if you let it. Then all you need to do is keep your nose and mouth free for long enough to take a breath every minute or so, and you can float forever, practically. It’s not hard to do. That’s what they teach in survival school.
She looked at me strangely, and then went on about how hard it was to keep afloat in this economy and how expensive it would be to replaster a wall.
Of course I did not want to insult her, and since she could not listen I didn’t insist on my point of view. Yet it seems to me that when we get anxious, as she clearly was, we tend to use vocabulary that makes us feel more anxious. Then we believe those words, even when they’re not true. She wasn’t drowning, yet she’d convinced herself she was close to it.
The words we use do matter. The words we choose can rob us of peace.
How to find Happiness
Posted on | June 16, 2009 | No Comments
Happiness, like sadness and anxiety, is very often a learned condition. We learn how to be gloomy from those around us. Yet if we want to we can also train ourselves to see happiness, respond to joy, to experience delight - and it doesn’t take a lot of work, merely practice. Sadness, by contrast, is something we’ve been practicing all our lives, and so we’re much better at it. The daily news delivers gloom and despair by the bucket load, but doesn’t ask us to see much in the way of joy.
We are, many of us, the olympic gold-medalists of gloom.
But there is a way forward. Happiness and joy can be found in any little thing. And like grass growing between paving slabs it doesn’t need much to get started, and it forces its way through. This is, in fact, its great strength. Sadness requires heavy blows to our psyche. To get us to cave in we need repeated attacks of events that can bring us down. Losses, mistreatment, betrayals. That’s what it feeds on. Joy, in contrast, can bubble up out of any little thing. And it often does.
Joy is stronger, every time. It’s a good idea to act out of that knowledge.
How to find peace
Posted on | June 15, 2009 | No Comments
I’ve had this experience a number of times now and I felt it might be a good idea to share it, possibly to see if anyone else knew the feeling.
The feeling is like this: I am in a calm, empty sunlit room, and then I become that calm room, and the breeze blows gently, just flapping the curtains. As it does so I know that if I am anything I am the space enclosed by the room, and that the divine is wafting through, as the breeze, bringing energy that for now I get to bask in.
As a kid I used to get the feeling when lying in the grass under a big oak tree just up the hill from where I lived; then the feeling came and went at various times in my later years. I always thought it had to do with the physical place I was in, so I spent time going back to places that seemed to be able to create what I wanted - not always successfully. Now I see it has much more to do with the way I use my mind.
By writing this, now, I know that I can remind myself of what this feeling is and so I’ll be able to access it much more easily. Like happiness; when you know what it feels like, and remind yourself what it feels like in each part of your body, you discover that there’s far more of it around than you ever dreamed. You just have to pay attention to what your senses are telling you. They’ll let you know when you’ve stumbled into happiness. The same thing happens with peace.
I know I’ve always had this feeling available. I just forgot how to locate it for a while.
“Mistaken Long, I sought you then
In Busy companies of men” Andrew Marvell 1653
Marriage and anxiety in the USA
Posted on | June 14, 2009 | No Comments
Yesterday I was interviewed by Garima Singh for her documentary-in-progress on the nature of love and our attitudes to it. Garima is a wonderful person, and was born in India so she brings a double-culture perspective to the topic that is fascinating. India still has a high number of arranged marriages, for example, and even though this is a custom that has run into some resistance of late it still carries the weight of accepted tradition.
One of the things that came up was that in a world such as ours where we are free to choose our partners and free to divorce if all does not go well we should, by rights, be more at peace with our emotional lives. In fact, though, the opposite is true. Americans are desperate about their emotional lives, in ways that we don’t find in more restrictive cultures, and they’re terrified of getting it wrong. So why is this?
Well, years ago when societies were smaller (think: ’small town’) and divorce was rare, then you had a limited choice of mates, and once you had chosen you were stuck with the relationship. If it soured after a few years you had the comfort of knowing that you were in a group that probably comprised at least half of your acquaintance. So, the inner dialog was likely to be something like this: OK, it didn’t work out. Oh well. These things happen. And one got on with loving one’s kids, or playing golf, or something that was a reasonably healthy compensation.
Today, however, if one doesn’t manage to have a reasonable relationship there is likely to be a rumbling of opinion. People will say that of course it didn’t work because he or she isn’t easy to get on with, that work was too important, that there was too much childhood trauma, too much fear…. you name it. The failure to achieve happiness is often seen as a psychic failure, or even a moral failure (”He should have worked through that in therapy years ago…”).
Some people do come into that category of being morally and personally at fault. But certainly not all. Some people are unlucky, after all. Yet the prejudice remains, and the effect of that prejudice is to make Americans even more anxious.
We do the same thing with monetary success, of course. In a wealthy society such as ours the failure to make money is seen as a personal failing, not as the result of bad luck or bad timing. The auto-workers laid off this year are, on the whole, feeling pretty bad about themselves right now, and not just because of the loss of income. They know the prejudice that is coming their way is a moral prejudice. When I was out of work as a young professor I felt the same thing, when it was an economic downturn that had turned my hard-learned skills to ashes, if only temporarily. Friends of mine who are artists and musicians may be world famous, but many of them haven’t ever made much money. And pubic attitudes to them, and their choices to do what they love rather than what paid well, have been, well, puzzled.
Which brings us back to love. I personally think that love is what we’re on earth to do, no matter how successful or unsuccessful our earnings and our romantic attachments. For love reaches further than romance. Perhaps we should assess others by how well they love.
Garima’s documentary will give us a much-needed nudge in that direction.
Art - busting out all over
Posted on | June 10, 2009 | No Comments
For the past few weeks I’ve found myself going to art events; openings, open studio events, and so on, with more on the calendar. Most recently I’ve been to SoWa (south of Washington) to see the wonderful studios in the converted red-brick factory buildings there which a couple of years ago were desolate and ruinous. They seem to have no trouble filling the converted spaces with artists of all kinds.
There are so many, in fact, that I’m not even sure where all the artists have come from. They certainly didn’t seem to be lurking in the shadows waiting for these spaces to be built, although I could be wrong about that. But now it’s clearly a case of ‘if they build it they will come’.
Not all the art is first rate. Yet that isn’t altogether a bad thing. I’d say it was actually very good news, because it tells me that there are huge numbers of people who, for whatever reason, have decided to be artists - even though it might not pay the rent yet, even though they have no guarantee of commercial success. They feel their creative urges strongly enough to say: That’s it! I’m going to give myself the experience of creativity! Without that basic courage, that leap of faith, no art worth the doing will ever happen. These people are doing something bold and necessary for their souls; they’re living their creativity.
A few years ago everyone was jumping around going to the gym and getting fit. That’s good for the body, and for the soul, too, and I wouldn’t say a bad word about that. Now, though, it feels as though we have a similar upsurge of people who want to grow their spirits, too.
Make art, not hedgefunds.
Hi—I’m Allan Hunter, author of The Six Archetypes of Love and Stories We Need to Know as well as two books on writing for self-exploration, Life Passages and The Sanity Manual. If you’re looking to live your best life I hope you’ll find lots of inspiration here.
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