Tag: travel

Savoring

April 28th, 2018

Studying happiness seems counter-intuitive. My tendency is to think that the more time I spend on studying how to be happy, the less time I’m spending ‘just being’, which is a happy state, isn’t it? Yet, I was drawn by two respected sources (a Buddhist teacher and the less respected Very Bad Wizards podcast), to a popular Coursera class, taught by Yale professor Laurie Santos, called simply The Science of Well-Being, and thought, “Why not give it a try?”

Everything about our technological age tells me we have to learn to operate in ways that go beyond basic intuitions we trust in. Certainly everything until now has pointed to a belief that my own sense of myself is closest to correct, precisely because I do invest in knowing myself, do pay attention to examining deepest motivations. I’ve made daring, dramatic changes so as to line up authentically with the resulting realizations.

But what about operating in a world where data may have a better read on my core-motivations and ingrained habits than I do? Data has no motivation to look away from blind spots. What about functioning in a world that, I won’t say weaponizes but definitely capitalizes, on pushing all my high-school level comparative triggers, to get me to look away from what I might best benefit from seeing? Rather than rant about the effects of social media on our psyches and society we keep having strong and frightening glimpses of, why not try to learn more about what I’m contending with?

The course offers upgraded versions of familiar strategies such as gratitude & savoring.

Savoring might be as simple as taking time to write out a pleasurable experience or accomplishment… to go back and notice with better attention. It is conjuring something positive twice, stretching it out, lingering it longer (yes that’s an odd way to say that but it means what I mean). 🙂 The key point is bringing the sensation stronger to memory, so that as you come into the next moment/next opportunity, gratitude is the nearest frame at hand.

4.28.2018 Miami

Doing this intentionally over a few weeks, even though I thought I had a good gratitude game going already, has meant that in most transitions modes where I’m switching from one thing to another, I have found myself a tiny bit slower to reach for quick hits of emotion like frustration or judgment.

At first, the practices felt to me like magical thinking, but there is a very strong foundation, rooted in acceptance of human ‘hedonic adaptation’, rather than crediting happiness to the powers of self and will. Really, understanding this concept of hedonic adaptation is already worth taking the course. It basically means that what we think will make us happy, is not what actually makes us happy. Scientists have found various ways to test this idea and have come up with pretty useful tools to thwart or delay the tendency to follow our outdated intuitions on this, like increasing variety and interrupting consumption, and switching reference points.

I come from a background of nurturing greater awareness-in-general, or awareness-for-its-own-sake, as a kind of panacea. I’ve figured out that experiences are weightier than things, for instance, but it was still interesting to consider the studied reason behind that: that things more often stick around long enough for us to grow tired of them.

My daughter has issues with migraines recently, so we’ve been going from appointment to appointment and test to test, to get a sense of what might be going on. In the process we’ve learned a lot about how people have to live now when it comes to basic things like sitting and standing, not always looking forward. We may ‘know’ that “sitting is the new smoking” when it comes to health, that posture is crucial, that interrupting the flow of productivity to check on well-being is actually not optional, but it can still take something disruptive to make us actually DO THINGS (like savoring, gratitude) to change our ways.

Advertisement
Appreciation: Presenting what Presents

April 18th, 2018

Have returned from a trip – my first to Europe – and from writing elsewhere about the trip in a way that surprised me. The recounting poured through like sunshine first thing in the morning, and I could hardly leave my bed–where I’d started off writing just a few simple notes–for most of the day. :

By 6 pm I was hobbling in pain, my back loudly protesting what I’d done, but wasn’t sorry. In the community, there came genuine appreciation that I’d tried to bring into the experience those who had not been able to go, to include them in the adventure. Of course, it wasn’t that I could include anyone anywhere, but they appreciated that I took the time to show they were already included… something the dynamics of the group have taught me to see throughout ten years involvement.

This felt connected to my waking a few weeks ago with the thought loudly before my eyes: “I don’t want to teach. I (just) want to write!” Which seemed odd out of context of the many years in which I’ve worked to articulate knowledge I feel has empowered my life, with the idea of ‘helping’ others. I felt released from that burden.

Why have I done that anyway? In part, out of a desire to show appreciation, to ‘make good’, like a child who is well aware of what their parents have sacrificed to give them greater opportunities. But times have changed. There is a hierarchical way of sharing, of giving and receiving, that isn’t quite appropriate anymore, even if our institutions and formulas have not moved beyond that way of thinking. We’re walking funny lines.

The ‘appreciating food’ practice a friend on the trip shared, consisted of taking a moment to contemplate how our meals, in all their myriad components, had reached our table. Each time we ate together she walked through some of the many factors and relationships required for any given meal, much less the innumerable factors necessary to gather such disparate people as we ourselves from all over the world, to appreciate that presentation. This practice, although simple, deeply affected my way of seeing during the trip. Perhaps the writing took on that flavor as a natural overflow.

It is far too easy to snap into a category and write ‘about that’, to try to line things up with calculations of what is wanted… what is most ‘useful’. However, the benefit of going with what pours out is that there is 0 pretending. There are too many factors, so you give up on capturing them all in advance, and go along with the momentum appreciatively.

This may be what Steve Jobs was getting at when he said that people don’t know what they want until you show them. Market research is useful, but incredibly limited. It matters to me that I’m clear and that what I write takes in mind the benefit of others, but I can’t be driven by that. I can’t be driven by a motive to ‘do good’. That’s an effect that in a way, I trust to happen from a deeper devotional intention.

There is a TED Talk that speaks to this beautifully, given by Elizabeth Gilbert who wrote Eat Pray Love. She gave this talk about genius and inspiration after the gigantic success of that novel, so it comes from a vulnerable place, asking, “What if my best work is behind me?” It isn’t a talk centralizing on fear. Rather, it draws upon the way genius moves, and what genius is… how much wider and free-er than can be contained by the will of a vessel trying to do well or be special.

If you haven’t seen it, it is worth the 20 minutes, and gets better and better as it goes on.

Tag: travel

Savoring

Appreciation: Presenting what Presents