Transformation 45 » Happiness

Flow of lives

Louis — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 17:09:11 +0000

Andrea Fitzpatrick lost her job last August and foundered for a while, as she struggled with her sense of self-worth. She had identified herself with her career, whatever it had happened to be. Corporate advance, money, and social status were the things that defined her. Unsurprisingly, they were not the things that made her happy, something she only truly discovered after being fired.

It’s an interesting story. On the one hand, it was heartening that someone had discovered happiness to come from something other than the superficial banalities of one’s life. On the other hand, it was sad that there are many people, perhaps most, who must actually learn this lesson.

A belief in fulfillment

And so I am not shocked that, like me, god believers are saddened by the hollowness of so many lives lived in emptiness, fulfilled by nothing and driven by the most amoral of motivations. I am not surprised at the satisfaction believers have in their lives, filled as they are with a pursuit that, no matter what unrecognizable form it may ultimately take, at the very least seeks meaning for themselves and everyone. I am not surprised by the confidence of their beliefs, by the resistance their faith has to that which disputes it.

Of course, I know they are terribly misguided for that faith, and the details of their belief are their ultimate undoing, and no reconciliation is possible between dogmatic positions and a truly happy existence. But I say that out of a need to clarify. It doesn’t really matter, this time.

It indicates that a life of true fulfillment comes from everything that seems not to define the majority of us. In the West, most have forgotten so simple a truth utterly. It may be cliché to bring up the fact that material pursuits have replaced our sense of satisfaction with ourselves and each other, but often truth is to be discovered anew in aphorisms like that.

It’s one reason for the divide and the ultimate conflict between those with faith and the secular world they inhabit. On a larger scale, it hints at more troubling issues: the conflict between Islam and the West, as an example, and the failure of either to find areas of common values and goals.

A flow of lives

But I must recede once again to the microcosm of a single life. Unlike James Randi, who is nearing the end of his journey, I can’t look back at a remarkable life to reminisce on scores of remarkable experiences. I’m far too ordinary.

There are issues to deal with, and things that seem like setbacks, but its very simplicity makes my life deeply fulfilling. Alex and I have a circadian beat to our lives that offers happiness I could scarcely imagine when I was in my twenties, clambouring for money and sex and superficial relationships and fun, and other trivialities. There is the expanse of Bronte Creek Park near my home, small though it might seem to some, that holds a portion of my consciousness in its fields and woods and paths. There are the hundreds of books in my library, holding hundreds of thousands of pages, that fill up the corners of my barely satiable curiosity. And there is the incidental interaction with people, acquaintances and strangers, offering the opportunity to imagine the details of another life, and, if I can, if only in the smallest of ways to make that other path slightly more navigable.

I like my work and I’m considered fairly successful, but it’s simply a lucky tool that allows me to live a life away from it. There are so many better things, more important things. The breathtaking breadth of human history in front of me at this very moment, for example, or living inside the cream-coloured pages of my library. I’m staggered when I think about the billions of lives that have shaped what humanity is right now; or the trillions upon trillions of beings that have directed the course of life on the planet.

Something in me goes very quiet when the sun sets beneath the purple clouds over the peaks of houses behind us. I feel as though I’m sharing the lives of the finches that wake me up each morning as they build a nest beneath the trough under my bedroom window, which they and their ancestors have done for as long as I’ve lived here. We’ve been here many years, but we’re still apart from virtually all the neighbours. Sometimes when we come home in the car, one of their kids waves at us, though we are silent strangers to them and their parents, and it makes me smile. Alex has a swimming friend that he picks up every Sunday morning. She usually bakes him cake on Saturday night, and he comes home full. Despite our shyness, and what must seem like stand-offishness, the neighbours directly beside us invite us for an hour or two of drink and conversation every Christmas and every summer, and have always been immeasurably kind to us.

There’s so much loveliness, so much fulfillment in life that I’m surprised when I hear stories of lessons learned, like Ms. Fitzpatrick’s. What deep pleasure there is to be found in the world’s accessible corners. What meaning there is in the most straightforward of relationships. How gorgeous things are. How important we all, each of us, are, to one another, to the flow of lives beginning in the incomprehensibly distant past and that builds our story for the sake of our existence alone. How completely beautiful, unknowable, and livable it all is.

When we went for the last time

Louis — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 01:50:48 +0000

I wake Alex up early, and we pack towels, books, and drinks into the car. We’re on our way right on time, and we stop at the usual place for bagels and coffee before setting out on the highway.

It’s a beautiful day, the best of the summer, and the last of the summer. There’s not a cloud in sight. It must be thirty degrees. If only it had been like this the many other weekends before. It has been a summer of rain and false starts and cancelled plans, but now we’re on our way with one last try for a day trip away from home.

The trip is a long one, more than two hours, and on the way we have to fill up. Before, as we’d move west and south, the clouds would gather, and the temperature would drop, but today, the sun stays bright, the sky crisp blue and hot. It’s perfect weather.

When we reach Port Rowan, it’s a further twenty or so minutes on the road leading along the forty kilometre spit toward Long Point. The weather still holds, the air is still hot and beautiful. There are lots of cars around, and as we get near the park, it seems it will be a crowded day in there. But not where we’ll be.

We park, and take out the towels and the frisbee and the umbrella, and start a long thirty-minute walk along the park’s beautiful beach. The lake is stunning. There’s a breeze, but the surface is relatively calm, and perfectly reflects the dark blue of the sky and the slightly pink horizon at the furthest edge of sight. It hasn’t looked this beautiful all year. When we near the water’s edge, we can see right to the soft rippling sand at the bottom for as far as we’re able to look out.

We walk past the rows and rows of moms lying motionless in the bright sun, and kids and dads yelling and laughing in the water. As we near the eastern part of the spit, the crowd thins, and then there are just a couple of families, and then we are at the division line between the park and the boundary along the bird sanctuary. We cross under the metal rope. There’s still a few people even here. A man is taking pictures of his wife and infant daughter playing in a shallow pool of water. “Can you take our picture,” he asks. Of course. It’s always him and the little girl, or his wife and the little girl, and they can never get a picture of all three, he says. They’re very happy, and both of them thank us several times.

Now there is nobody else, but up ahead, we can see one or two bodies along the beach, and somebody’s in the water. We’re here. We won’t have to wear clothes or a swimsuit along this part, at the very edge of the private property that extends to the furthest point of the spit. We find a nice flat space in the sand, and set up our umbrella, and spread out our towels. There’s only a few people here: an older couple at the very water’s edge, where a woman is reading in a lawn chair in the shallows before the lake opens up; a younger couple to our right; one or two others lying in the sand, or moving along the beach.

We walk out into the lake, past a warm shallow full of tiny minnows, and into the expanse of water under the sky. The water is beautiful, reflecting bright blue, and large ripples lap at us as we make our way out as far as possible before the lake would go over our heads. Alex has his goggles. He swims a few short laps of freestyle in the open water.

It looks kind of neat. I go back for my camera, and hold it carefully above the water as I make my way back to him. I get some pictures of him doing strokes, and then he’s standing waist-deep in the lake with the sun behind him, shining off his wet shoulders, his goggles on his head. I take more photos. He glides into the water on his back and free-floats, his face turned to the blue sky. “This feels weird, like I’m falling,” he says.

After a while, we return to our towels. Alex reads. The sun moves toward the western horizon, in the opposite direction of the furthest point of the sand bar. I lie back and doze. I listen to the sound of the waves rolling up onto the sand, the gulls and cormorants croaking or cawing in the distance.

Some time passes, and it’s hot. We take up the frisbee and go out into the lake, and toss it back and forth for almost two hours. It’s the most fun we’ve had. We both lunge as it flies overhead, or to the left or right. You can do this much better in the water, because there’s no danger of a hard fall to the ground. It’s great stretching out into the sky to reach as it flies past, then crashing into the water — either with the disc in hand, or not. The waves sometimes add to the push of water from the lunge, and many times it rolls over my head, or up against my face. I’ve got my hat on, and Alex laughs at the sight. Water pours over the bill in front of my face.

Sometimes I stop while Alex swims for the frisbee. I stand in the deep water and look into the blank horizon, against the wind, which has now picked up. It’s gentle and beautiful, still warm, but holds in its crispness a hint of the coming autumn. Then I fall back and float, looking up at the perfectly clear dome of sky.

We’re done after a while, and return to the beach. The afternoon is getting on to evening; it’ll be turning dusk soon, and we should go.

After we pack, we walk in silence back along the beach. It’s empty now on this part of the spit. Alex is walking slowly many paces behind. When we get to the park’s lakefront, we walk past a little city made out of sand that someone has built. It’s very detailed. There’s even an airport, a parking lot with little sand cars, and a baseball stadium with a diamond and grandstand seating. There’s some buildings with long blades of grass connecting them in arches, and everywhere there are feathers and sticks and grass used as markers and columns. At one end, there are three huge pyramids made of sand. Are they mountains?

Out on the lake, the setting sun is sparkling on the surface of the water at the crest of the little waves. It looks alight, or as though there are small jewels or lights rising above the surface and lowering again.

We’re very tired when we finally reach the car. We drive out of the park, and through Port Rowan toward Simcoe, where we’ll stop and eat. The sun has almost fully lowered. The light is orange and gold, the sky still empty. It’s been such a beautiful day.

We think this was the last day of the summer, at the end of a summer mostly wet and cool that had stopped us from doing the things we’d planned. But now, this last day stands behind us. The most beautiful day, the most perfect company. In the future, we’ll talk about the time we went to Long Point, when Alex swam the freestyle in the lake for the first time, when he stood against the perfect blueness of the sky, and we threw the frisbee and stretched into the perfect clear air of the loveliest day of the summer.

Audio reading of this entry.

The end of happiness

Louis — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 03:58:29 +0000

There has been a discussion at DPChallenge.com lately about the nature of morality. Typically, the religionists are lined up on one side, arguing that the only moral source in the universe is their particular god. The atheists dutifully face off with them, presenting ideas about morality’s prehistory, its probable source in genetics, how it favours the survival of a species, or its otherwise innate nature. There is little agreement other than that morality is somehow desirable, and immorality is not.

Of course, it isn’t easy to define morality, especially when the waters are muddied with ideas about its paranormal origins, or the insistence of some people in equating morality with dogmatic adherence to their religious script. But at its most irreducible, morality is that condition in human beings that recognizes suffering in other beings, seeks to end it, and desires to replace it with happiness. There is little else that it needs to be concerned with, rules of copulation, or the hierarchical roles of certain members of society, for example. Conversely, immorality can be said to be that condition which is unconcerned with the suffering, or happiness, of other beings.

I think people tend to show their true moral fibre in dealing with strangers. I personally have a difficult time with strangers. I am usually suspicious of them, and it is with only a great effort that I can bring myself to give a stranger the benefit of the doubt. I seem to be predisposed to mistrusting those I don’t know at all. What comes along with this is a tendency to discredit the actions of strangers, to cast their most innocent actions in a bad light, to assume the worst in people. It’s a disheartening struggle, because I otherwise enjoy almost everyone around me. I’m endlessly fascinated by people’s behavioural minutiae; I truly love the humanity in people.

Alex and I are relatively new swimmers, and we inhabit the “slow lane” during our four-nights-a-week lap swim. We seem to be stronger swimmers than most in that lane, but neither of us are comfortable moving on.

An older woman, a very slow swimmer perhaps in her mid fifties, has been cajoling Alex, trying to get him into the intermediate lane. Her jokes are rather unsubtle, but her smile is genuine, and one day last week, we spotted her at another pool, where Alex had a short pleasant conversation with her.

During last night’s swim, she hinted once again that he should move on, in a pleasant, undemanding way. He responded that he lacked the confidence for the next lane, and that was that.

A young teenaged boy later got in her way. “Move,” she barked at him, jerking her thumb toward the faster lane. “Sorry,” he said quietly, and swam out of her way. “I’m fucking sick of this,” she growled.

It was actually quite shocking. One doesn’t expect an otherwise kind older woman to come up with that kind of language, let alone for a child. The dramatic about-face in her demeanor was appalling. I later reasoned that she was showing us what she truly thought of her situation in the slow lanes amongst faster swimmers, and that she could not until that moment vent her frustration on us, her peers, the way she could do on a young person.

We could do nothing but ignore her for the rest of the evening, and before the swim ended, she left, her face blank, but underwritten with some kind of negative sentiment — disgust (in herself?), dejection, weariness, loneliness.

She had, in that moment, displayed her true moral being, unconcerned for the welfare of anyone else. Her willingness to inflict this kind of suffering on someone, small-scale though that suffering might be, revealed her nature. Her behaviour was highly immoral. In that moment, there seemed no question for me that this woman should be ignored by us. She seemed a small entity, as unsympathetic as she was lacking sympathy.

Why would I concern myself with this kind of non-event? There was a momentary lowering of the guard on what appears to be a rather crass older woman, and some kid bore the brunt of it and moved on. That’s that. So why would I even give it a moment’s thought?

It is indeed for the way she left. The look on her face as she walked, alone, off the deck, was about as telling as the hissing profanity. She was indeed alone. She was indeed not proud of her reaction. She was quite friendless in that moment.

I see myself in that woman. I see the moral duality, the natural sympatico coupled with the innate dourness, the easy will to negativity. I see in her behaviour the same behaviour in myself — the path of least resistance in impersonal dealings with strangers, leading to minute forms of suffering that only add to the endless measure of unhappiness in the world. I see in her, and in myself, an agent of Sadness. Sadness doled out bit by bit, in increments barely noticeable, until their crushing weight destroys the equally minute measures of happiness that may have been offered.

Morality is the will to actively end suffering, and promote happiness. There is no small measure of suffering; there is no small measure of happiness.