The Problem with People

The problem with people is they eventually die. So, in that sense, you really can't count on them one-hundred percent. Also, while they live, they tend to let you down; disappoint you, from time to time -- sometimes profoundly. It's inevitable. Everyone will, at some point, let you down. This means they are human and imperfect; it's not a jab at them. I think this is all a pretty good reason not to hang all of your hopes for happiness on other people: not your best friend; not your spouse; not your family. It's really not fair to ask that of them. 

All of the pop-sociologists and even the more depth-delving psychologists say that one is happier with a circle of friends. Sure, we are social animals. Some of us less than others, but none of this changes the fact that none of us want to be alone. We all need companionship. 

But, like I said, companions die and they let us down. What do we do then?

We should be able to turn to non-social things that make us happy. Not just diversions, but true, deeply-beloved activities. I'll always have music and writing. What will you have?

I hope it is something truly big. Something profound and moving. Something that fuels your engines with the hottest flames, pushes steam through your veins and powers your traction motors to turn your wheels forward forever, over steep hills and through the darkest tunnels. 

I am not saying that you should shun humanity. I'm just saying you should have something to turn to when the inevitable happens. 

Torture and Contentment

Isn't it fascinating how some people love things that other people hate? I know, I know...that's a simplistic statement. But emphasis on "love" and "hate" in the most literal sense.

It is a real testament to how different our inner worlds are.

Sitting on the beach is a great example. There are people for whom sitting in the sun on the beach is a Sublime experience in the most seriously Wordsworthian sense. For me, sitting on the beach is a few degrees short of a living hell. I despise sitting in the sun. (It almost induces in me a feeling of panic.) Walks on the beach and swimming? Sign me up. Sitting on the beach in the evening? Delicious. But to sit in the sun for hours at a time...no thanks. If I wanted to feel that way, I'd have gone to college and majored in being a dinner biscuit.

But as humans, how can we all be humans and have such wildly different instinctual reactions to things? It's mind boggling. That is why I recoil so violently from generalizations, even when those generalizations are made by the experts -- psychologists and sociologists, etc.

Often, I have seen advice on "how to be happy." Often, I have given advice on how to be happy. But how much is that worth if there are guys like me running around hiding from sunlight and other people literally basking in it? (I even have a friend who has said she adores the feeling of a sunburn. I can't even imagine. Sunburn, to me, is natural torture.)

This being so, how can we say: People are happier when they spend time outdoors; people are happier when they have a large network of friends; people are happier when they have dogs"? To answer what you probably expected to be a rhetorical question, the answer is: because these things apply to most people. I think it is really important that the "most" part be emphasized. If not, the minority who like being alone; who only have one or two good friends; who don't like pets...these people might come to the conclusion that they are broken. That doesn't help anyone.

Another simplistic statement to close this out: The bottom line is that we are similar and wildly different, but I think we pay more attention to the similarities because that is easier. I'm only suggesting we almost use a boilerplate qualifier when suggesting formulae for contentment; a "your mileage may vary."

....because if being around friends is good for you mental health but gatherings drive you crazy...

The Joy of "Becoming'

I really am not trying to be dramatic when I say that this is, possibly, the most important post I have ever written. Fact is, if I am right about what I think on this one, and if I express it clearly enough, it really is. If I am wrong, or weak with my presentation, down the digital drain this one goes along with most of the others.

The inspiration is in an incident, last summer. My wife and I were on the train in Chicago, and I looked across at a young man who was reading More's Utopia, pen in hand, his book bag next to him, his dark, unkempt brown hair looking compellingly like my own at his age. He was undoubtedly on his way to class; probably an English major -- as I was -- or maybe a philosophy major.

I turned to my wife and I said: "I miss being that guy."

Because that used to be me, riding the train to school, with a copy of Utopia or Lyrical Ballads or Leibnitz's Monadology close to my face, in serious danger of missing my stop, having been so immersed in exploration of the thoughts greater minds.

My wife, Karen, said, "You still are that guy, right? You are always reading, thinking, composing, writing... What do you mean?"

For a while, I didn't know how to answer. For months, even...

At the end of last school year, I was talking to a class of departing seniors. In conversation, I wound up advising them about something I had been pondering for a long time. I told them that I think happiness comes from living in a state of "becoming." "Becoming" is a state that they have lived in since birth. As such, they are generally unaware of that state's magic; the magic of having real purpose.

Why are kids usually happy and energetic? Because they are becoming people; they are becoming themselves. This is the most meaningful work they will ever undertake. Somewhere, in their hearts, if not conceptually, they feel that it is. Everyone wants his or her existence to have a purpose. Becoming might be the biggest purpose we are ever blessed with.

Young people are also becoming athletes; they are becoming lawyers or carpenters or teachers or beauticians. After becoming a person of their own, they set about carving out a spot for themselves in "the world." Still, meaningful work, but less profound: "Now that I have a sense of who I am, where's my seat at the table?"It's a second stage.

Then, we get older. Out of school; out of training, we get a job and we are still, to a small extent, becoming, but what we are becoming gets narrower, less of a Herculean and Romantic achievement: from worker to manager; teacher to principal; a craftsman to foreman; supervisor to CEO. (That is, if we don't give up on growing, altogether, as the hopeless do...)  But this is nowhere near the glorious pursuit of "self" from our days of youth. At this point, life feels like too much of an arrival and an arrival means the long trip is over...which, in this case (you know...life), is decidedly not cool.
 

This climbing of the professional ladder is not the same as lying in bed at night, imagining ourselves winning the World Series with a walk-off homer or conducting the Philadelphia orchestra [guilty on both counts]. The self, in adulthood, is already there; the house is built; the rest is just a rearranging of the furniture -- which can be fulfilling, but not as fulfilling as planing the boards and driving the nails and watching the whole thing take shape against a cobalt sky.

And that was the difference I wasn't able to articulate that day on the train. I hadn't lost my ideals or my enthusiasm, but that young man was the ghost of my twenty-year-old self. He was on the great adventure I once undertook; he was becoming himself...finding his way through the forests of intellectuality and marveling at every new path his sneakered steps revealed.

My "house," as of that Chicago day, was built; the grand work was done, and I was just adding to the library; adding yet another book to the shelves, another picture to the wall...but his readings were shaping him in significant ways, as mine once did and there was a glorious, compelling, motivating question mark in front of him.

In short -- no I am not kidding -- I think being in a state of "becoming" is nothing less than the secret to lifelong happiness, if we grasp what it really means. I think we can go back to "becoming," even in the third act of existence.

Not all of us. For those of us who lave let our hearts die, there is no hope. But for those of us who have held on to wonder and who are not embarrassed to do a little middle-aged navel-gazing, it's completely doable.

For me, it was a question of rearranging of my responsibilities to allow for more time for my creativity and for getting closer to that guy I used to be, again. But this means I need a new question mark; not just a goal of status, but one of real growth.

For me, it is now nothing less than trying to establish myself in a "third act" career: professional composer. Now, with an agent putting my work into the hands of music supervisors and music libraries around the world, I am learning a new business, yes; but I am also learning more about composition than I knew before; I am facing challenge after challenge with the constraints of my composition assignments. I am exploring a new world of musical technology that allows me to write full orchestral scores in my little studio. I am looking at artistic growth, but my sight is also set on something completely new: becoming a full time composer. I'm still hoping for something. (The ghost of the young aspiring composer I once was is, at this moment, in his bedroom, bent over a Ravel score, with headphones on...wondering where his musical life will take him.)

Every time I get a note from my agency that another piece has been forwarded to a music supervisor, it is like a mini college acceptance letter, if you will -- a sign that another door has opened. Each time I get a rejection critique from an industry pro, I learn more about what it takes for me to grow as a composer. In short, I am "in school" again. If you want, you can say it is some variant of "feeling like a kid again." I really don't mind.

So, for my young readers, I guess this is a plea to keep looking for ways to "become" even after it feels you have arrived. For my fellow middle-agers: if you feel like you're just waiting for that great gettin' up morning, facing a string of sprawling, similar days with no sense of excitement, find a way to become something new, but pick something deeper than just taking a pottery class or doing Tai Chi at the local gym. Think big. Become another you. Get back on that "train to school," not just to take classes but to pursue a new question mark. There is plenty of time to build a whole new house. And, if there's not -- no controlling fate -- at least you'll "go down standing up."

I hope I did the idea justice. If this came off as me saying "keep learning new things" or "stay active," one or both of us failed... It's, as I said, way bigger than that.

Remembering Epiphanies

It's amazing how impotent philosophical epiphanies can be. Like, they are not enough. They are the moments when we decide to plant the tree. They are the energy behind digging the hole and dropping in the seed and covering it up. Plants, however, need to be watered, or they die.

I'm talking about issues as straight-forward as weight-loss: "Today I am going to begin exercising and eating properly because I don't want to die..." But I am also talking about deeper ideas. Those ideas that we know are a key to our personal happiness; a realization that we need to have in order to make sense out of existence. For instance, in 2011, I wrote a song called "Kaleidoscope." This is the chorus:

Could it be the soul is a kaleidoscope,
Changing shape and shifting colors --
Lit by different kinds of light
From one day to another?

In subsequent verses, "day" turns into "year" and then into "...one decade to another..." You get the picture.

It's based on the realization that we humans tend to look for that thing that fulfills us in life, as if is (or will be) one constant thing. As if even if it were a few things, that those few things would please us equally at all stages of life. It seemed to me, when this occurred to me, that the soul (human spirit; mid -- however you want to say it) must be too complex to respond to the same thing forever and (especially) at all times. Sure, there must be truths to what pleases us, but, even if we are deeply pleased by, say, swimming, swimming might not always please us -- not forever and not every day.

Seems like a solid idea. But the key is to remember it and to call it to memory at the right times; or before it is too late. (One must water the tree.) If one finds himself doing the same thing that used to give him joy, will he do it for months or a year or for a decade in dissatisfaction before it occurs to him that the kaleidoscope that is his soul might have shifted? That he needs to seek a different light? Will he make adjustments before he concludes that life, itself, is unfulfilling?

The epiphany is one thing, but one must remind himself to act when it proves true. That's harder.

(Here is "Kaleidoscope," if you care for a listen.)

A Path to Lifelong Happiness?

Olivier and Yorick

On Wednesday, I wrote about the fact that -- to cram things into a nutshell -- I seem to keep wanting to improve myself, musically, even though no one cares or is likely to reward me. Through a gradual series of thoughts since then, I realized that this kind of attitude might just be the secret to lifelong happiness.

Here's how the thoughts went. I saw a picture on Twitter of a French author who tried to kill herself (the tweet said) twice. I turned to my wife and said, as I have before -- which must be very comforting to her -- that I fully understand why people kill themselves. There have been days in especially long strings of mundane days, during which I thought: "This is it? This is my life?" I then imagine a person who feels trapped in these sorts of days; a person who sees no change coming; who has nothing to look forward to. I see, in short, Hamlet:

I have of late, (but wherefore I know not) lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of exercises; and indeed, it goes so heavily with my disposition; that this goodly frame the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy the air, look you, this brave o'er hanging firmament, this majestical roof, fretted with golden fire: why, it appeareth no other thing to me, than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. 'What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty! In form and moving how express and admirable! In action how like an Angel! in apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world! The paragon of animals! And yet to me, what is this quintessence of dust?

The Joy of Being In Medias Res

Each night, my sons and my wife and I all say, before bedtime, what we are thankful for. To Karen and me, this is important for reasons that include more than just the theological angle; it's important in fostering an understanding, in our boys, of the things that are going right in their lives. I know, for one, there are times in my life when I take stock and realize how absurdly grateful I should be for the way things have gone thus far, even in the face of trials and the occasional sufferings... (We all have them.)

I don't ever want to be all slap-happy and google-eyed about it, though. And I admit it grinds my gears a little when I hear people say they are "blessed" -- sounds like they got a free gift that I didn't. (Admittedly, this is a flaw in personal perspective...)

While we are on the subject, though...

Wait... "We"? Sort of lame to start a subject and then use that phrase: "While we are on the subject..." I mean, I put us there. It's not like I just got lucky and something came up, at a party, that I was happy to talk about...

(Hold on -- this is going to be a rough ride, this blog post...)

In Medias Canoe.

Be that as it may, while I am dominating, dictating and wallowing in my self-abosrbed subject, it occurs to me how good it is to be in medias res. (Oh, give me a break -- it is one of the only Latin phrases I know. I even linked to its definition so I could look like a scholar. Granted, I used it literally and not in the literary sense...but that's not important right now...)

Digging for Happiness

"Be thankful."

It's good advice. I guess it implies indebtedness to some benevolent universal presence, but I hear complete atheists saying that they are thankful, too. It's still valid for them. "Glad" is a good substitute word: "I'm glad I have such a great life."

Sometimes, we use the idea of being thankful as an argument that we have no right to ever complain. It's like the old mom thing, when a kid won't eat his Lima beans: "You should be thankful you have Lima beans. There are starving children who would love to have Lima beans."

Of course, this doesn't work. First of all, it just doesn't work, psychologically. Second, I don't even think starving kids would eat Lima beans.

Van Gogh

In life, we try to use the mom argument: How can I complain when I have a bad day at work? There are people with no jobs... That kind of thing. Usually, we all know, it doesn't work.

The Pot of Old Socks at the End of the Rainbow

Artistic fulfillment. So stinking elusive. You just have to fall back on the old cliche: the fulfillment just has to come from the doing; not the having done; not the accolades.

My band played on Saturday night to a pretty packed room. The place is biggish, too. Usually, we get a lot of positive feedback -- people dancing and singing along; a lot of smiles; a lot of high-fives when we come out with a song someone is surprised we are playing. We're usually pretty good at picking them, especially in that particular room.

Not last night. Last night, with the exception of a few moments, we might as well have been playing to a room full of cacti. It was like serving tennis balls into a hanging blanket. So what did we do? We played. We decided just to have fun. We sort of did, but, it was one of those nights you look forward to wrapping up.

Great American songwriter, Jimmy Webb -- who "gets it."

With my own original music, I find that, with Internet radio play -- Spotify, Radio Airplay, etc. -- that people are responding very favorably. Hundreds are people are bothering to become "fans" of my songs, from New York to Great Britain to Singapore and Japan.

Dream X

Gene Krupa -- nourishing himself.

My son didn't want to go to karate class the other day. I asked him why not, even though
I knew: It was Saturday morning. He was in his jammies. Cartoons were on. Sloth was calling.

I pointed out that he sometimes complains about going but always has a good time when he is there. He acknowledged this and grumpily pulled on his uniform. He went. He had a good time. He returned to glorious Saturday sloth.

While the boys were at karate, I stepped out in the the rainy gloom to load my drums into the car for that night's job. I was grumpy. I didn't want to leave the warm house to go out into the fog and drive for half of an hour to a crowded room where I would be until two in the morning. I wanted to stay home.

I looked up at the iron clouds as I loaded my bass drum into the car. My winter breath rose up toward them. To my surprise, the clouds slowly took the shape of my father (he's very much alive, by the way, but this is too dramatic to pass up) who looked down upon me and slowly shook his puffy-cloud head, little ribbons of cottony moisture twirling in wisps to disappear into the gray ceiling.

"Dad? What the hell are you doing up there?"

Pleasing Processes

From time to time, as many of you know, I come back to "happiness" as an issue. What philosophical chap who's worth his weight in cheese doesn't? So, along those lines, it occurred to me that ends are never good. We humans hate ends of things, death especially. This is why we are thinking all wrong when we seek the attainment of a goal -- any goal -- and equate the "arrival" as a potential state of happiness.

I'm not just handing you a superficial bit about the evils of consumerism. It's more than that.

I think for most sane human beings, this formula is true: HAPPINESS = PLEASING PROCESSES.

It's just another version of "the journey, not the destination" thing, I guess.

Lewis and Clark:, in action. Musta been cool. 

All I know is that, for me, my happiest times come down to three things: family, exploration (intellectual or actual) and art. These are all works in progress, aren't they? Just having babies with my wife didn't make life wonderful -- the process of watching them grow and helping them find their way in the world does. As far as exploration is concerned, find answers is satisfying, but it doesn't bring the lasting happiness that the search did. And, with art, the process is the thing. I was happy to have finished my first full length CD, but that happiness has worn away; now I wish I were still working on it, because nothing compares to the contentment I feel sitting at my piano at midnight in my little studio. (So, I begin working on another...)

The Gift of Observation

Sunday nights sometimes make for the most melancholy posts; or, maybe just the sappiest ones. But I was thinking, today, about how people over-complicate one aspect of the ridiculously complicated job of parenthood: what they want for their kids. Me, I just want my boys to be happy. That's a cool place to settle into.

I don't wish for riches or fame for them. I don't consider it my duty to raise kids who "make a difference" or who become models of charity and goodness. I hope they exemplify good things, but I rather they be happy, in, at least, a "do no harm" kind of way. They must eventually decide if they want to be world-changers; that's the only way it can be sincere.

If I start plugging things into their lives -- things that I think are elements of future happiness for them based on what makes me happy -- I can screw up terribly. If I am going to help guide them into happy lives, I need to watch them. The best I can do is to point out, to them, what seems to make them happy. Because, isn't part of so many people's problems the fact that they don't recognize what really makes them content? -- and then that they replace what would be the true elements of personal happiness with some pale substitute? Sometimes, an outside view can clear up the internal lenses.

No Job Too Small

While I am on record (in pieces I could link to but am too lazy) as someone who believes that the individual human heart changes from day-to-day and from decade-to-decade and that one of the biggest mistakes made by your average human is to think that there is a permanent state -- that one thing -- which will bring about constant happiness, I must say that I have narrowed down my own contentment to the necessity for one surprising ingredient: the accomplishment of a mundane task per day.

We arteests are supposed to be driven by wine and a passion that rockets like fiery brushstrokes -- red comets of molten jois de vivre -- slashed across the starry canvass of life. We (if the movies are right) would rather burn out than fade away; we choke to death upon our own vomit in Parisian bathtubs (with those little lion’s claw feet) with dog-eared copies of Rimbaud clinging wetly, melancholically, to our soapy breasts; we’re inspired by pain and loss; we stand at the bows of doomed cruise ships and declare ourselves kings of the world; we die young and live for sensations of the mind and of the body…

But I’ll be damned if I don’t feel pretty darned inspired after I empty the dish washer.

In the end, a day without writing a song or a post or a chapter is just about equally as bad as a day without vacuuming the rug. And I do find that the mundane tasks often lead to the more profound: an evening of puttering in the studio, wrapping cords and dusting, often turns itself into a tune. 

I shouldn't be surprised -- it is all quite Taoist, isn't it? I used to criticize my neighbors who seemed to take such pleasure in grooming their lawns. Now I get it. I mean, I'll never be that guy, but I get it -- as long as something profound follows up the weed-wacking.

Redecorating the Head

Constable's "Willy Lott's Cottage"

If only people, including myself, could keep in mind that there is no quick-served happiness, especially when it come to "getting out of here" -- that phrase so commonly uttered by the young on late nights in home towns. Grown-ups do the same, though. I actually used to discuss, with my wife, the idea of opening a "bed-and-breakfast." What was I thinking?

What I was thinking was that changing everything would change everything for the better. What I was thinking was that running a bed and breakfast would be an escape from the unpleasantness of  humdrum life. We'd be in an idyllic place. We'd meet interesting people. We would not have to work "jobs".

This is a flawed and common problem in the thinking patterns typical of the human beast. The only way that running a hotel would be a pleasant life for me would be if I liked pouring coffee, making beds and making small talk with total strangers. I would like none of that.

Fat Man on a Ladder

If I weighed five-hundred pounds, that wouldn’t preclude me from giving decent weight-loss advice. If I knew everything about balancing intakes of good foods; if I knew the ideal caloric intake per day; if I recognized the need for exercise, I would still be the giver of good advice for passing this stuff along. My fatness would not affect the actual quality of my advice in the least.

Alas, knowing and doing are distinctly different things; yet, how many people have said that they have a hard time taking the advice of their overweight doctor who smokes Camels? Illogical, but understandable.

Yes, knowing and doing are two different things.

So what if there were a guy who faithfully writes a blog that posits fairly consistent ideas -- things like independence of thought; things like realizing the need to separate the self from community; things like simplifying a life full of extraneous things and appreciating the truly meaningful moments around us -- and what if that guy were to suddenly find himself in a position to have a good grab at the things he always writes about…but he doesn’t do it.

Why doesn't he do it? Perhaps the reasons look like pride and fear; like choosing comfort over opportunity. Maybe it’s a sense of fatherly responsibility -- maybe obligation to someone he loves more than the things he loves.

Stupid Smart People

It's easy to be happy if you are stupid. It's harder to be happy if you are smart. It's stupid to think that you need to be sad because you are smart.

Smartness can lead you to all sorts of things, but they don't have to be the prescribed ones. (The ones, I mean, that are written into conceptual law by the movies and the rock stars.)

Lately, it has been pretty much been treated as a given, by the intellectual set, that once you get smart you need to lose faith, lose hope and lose your sincerity. A policeman gets his badge and gun and uniform on that hard-sought day; a smart person gets smartness, recieves cynicism and loses faith, because he feels he must. A smart person leaves behind his smile, but puts on the robes of sullen superiority. He sees into the world and, so, sees its dark truth; therefore, he must be sad. To be happy is to be foolish; to be happy is to be a fool who grins in the face of tragedy, the smart person thinks. Anyone who is happy, the smart person asserts, is a fool, because the Earth is wrapped up in the twine of misery as the cork core of a baseball is wrapped up in twine of a more mundane ilk.

Fire Bundles

When are we grown-ups ever going to learn? We fret and fret over the things we put before our kids -- what we're doing right and what we're doing wrong -- and we toss and turn, worrying if we're crushing their creativity and initiative; whether the modern world is stealing their hearts away . . .

Of course, when I say "we" I mean "me" -- and maybe you, too?

But this morning, a misty Sunday with the absent sun returning for the first time in days to light up the droplets into diamonds on the grass, the smell of autumn earth as pleasant to me as the scent of a cake in the oven, I heard my smallest boy explaining something to his mother.

He was playing a "Toy Story" game on his fancy-schmancy portable gaming unit, and he was saying, "Mom -- I'm pretending this is "Silly Sheepies" (a show my sons put on with their stuffed animals during their weekend "sleep-overs" together in one of their beds) and they are trying to put Sheepie in the sheep-pound but Sean is trying to rescue them and  . . ."

Contentment vs. Happiness

There's a difference between happiness and contentment, isn't there? If the difference is what I think it is, then contentment might just be the answer to a satisfying life.

Contentment is less flamboyant than happiness. Happiness is a firework-pop of color and wonder. Happiness is a plunge on a sled. Happiness is a flood of endorphins that gets recognized for its intensity of pleasure. But contentment is a hot cup of coffee, slowly enjoyed; it's floating down a gentle stream on a raft, on one's back, watching overhead branches brush past the clouds. Contentment is a state of being, while happiness is more of an event. Happiness, as a more intense thing, can't really be sustained, but contentment can be.

The Worldwide Soliloquy

I believe this will happen. I really do.

Some day, everyone in the world, at the exact same time, is going to stop what they are doing and they are going to slap their own foreheads and speak the same soliloquy, in unison, from one end of the Earth to the other. This will be it:

Tragic Flaws and Eggshell Omelets

Last Friday, I wrote a piece called "Extra Lives" in which I proposed the idea that we all need to engage in activities that satisfy us -- activities that cater to the needs of the different elements of who we are: multidimensional beings of tremendous complexity. But when I thought back on it, it occurred to me that what I said could be seen superficially -- that it could seem like I am simply implying that we all need hobbies for stress relief.

I'm not talking about finding diversions. Diversions can be good for you, but they can also be dangerous. Too many years of diversions can set us up for a right cross from reality. For instance, finding an engrossing hobby can mean that while you spend every spare moment involved in that hobby, the rest of your life turns into a messy room you can't clean up without a front-end loader.

The Seer of Souls

Once, a man climbed a high mountain to reach the woman who could see the colors of souls. He had traveled many, many miles through thick forests and over sprawling plains to find this Seer of Souls; for, it was said that by finding the color of a person's spirit, she could give anyone the formula for his own particular happiness --  how to best cast light upon what lay within so that the color shone brightest. The man wanted to know: What will make me happy, forever?

On a cold night, slick with an invisible rain, he finally reached a plateau. There he found a small house, clean and strong, but small. The window poured buttery light out into the gloom. The man knocked softly.