THE FOUNDATION OF HAPPINESS
It appears that my “focusing illusion” lifelong has been double: that people in authority are honorable and know what they are doing, and that education is the key to everything. We all know how badly the first part of this idea has turned out worldwide, and now the value of education is shaky, depending on definitions. Both result from experiences. I could supply a long list of authorities from my father to my seminary professors of people who turned out to be empty, faking. Neither support nor protection nor guidance.
https://jamesclear.com/book-summaries/stumbling-on-happiness
This intriguing linked website offers to reduce good books to lists of content. The “pitch” of this book is for extended experience and expanded awareness. The identified danger is “squishing language”. An example is an experiment in which people felt that in California people were happier. Their picture of the state was derived from the narrowness of advertising. There was no awareness that the state includes northern forest, mid-rocky coast, interior ag valleys, and a range of mountains plus desert on the lee side. Woe to those who moved to California expecting the TV videos.
Kahneman, the theorist of pleasure, is talking to me when he says “in reality humans pursue the satisfaction which is connected to a large degree to social yardsticks — achieving goals, meeting expectations”. For many years this is what I did: meet the expectations of other people though they didn’t understand what it was I actually did to get the grade or the honor or how it felt. I mean, they expected me to be a “good girl” and an achiever, so I did my best. Towards the end of her life my mother, who was a teacher/librarian, said indignantly, “I made all these sacrifices for you because you had a high IQ. Now you say a high IQ means nothing.”
It mostly means that a person is good at taking IQ tests. If low income or stigmatized people have low IQ’s, it means they are not from the culture who wrote the test and defined which answers were “right.” Anyway, it turns out that there are MANY intelligences — music, movement, math, cross-species understanding, space visualization, and so on A mind is a symphony of intelligences, including awareness of holiness. What sources of pleasure!
So what we’re talking about here is how a person comes to terms with expectations from the larger community, how that makes them feel, and how the largest paradigms of circumstances — like pandemic or war — can change and challenge the decisions made.
My family on both sides were almost over-impressed by the idea of education but their version of what that might be was Edwardian at best. My father’s family was so proud of his Masters degree from Oregon State College, but it was about selling potatoes. Neither the objects nor the approach were anything but mercantile. My father filled the house with books, but they were pop bestsellers and he never read them. He collected 78 records of all the most loved classical music, but could not tell you about their derivation or meaning. After he was badly concussed in 1948, he could no longer control his temper and involved the whole family in a bad car accident. No one connected that to brain damage.
My cousin, following her mother, would not consider anything bad about “Uncle Bruce” because he was educated and a protective hero for his sister. She has been dead a long time, but looking back at photos and memories, I suspect what he protected her from was local sexual molestation. They were rural people in small communities, tight families.
This cousin insists that I’m “intellectual” and superior in that way, though I’m provably not. She was impressed that I got a scholarship to NU but can not imagine what a degree in theatre might be like. U of Chicago Div School is outside the ken of anyone in the family. (No one was a church goer except my mother.) Even she felt it was some mysterious realm that I was not really entitled to enter, like seeing God’s private parts. I was NOT among the best and the brightest, but honored and challenged to be there.
But I’ve used it too much, brandished it as though it were a flaming torch defending me from lions. Many times it worked and that made me happy. Other times it was just not relevant.
In the Sixties I partnered with a man twice my age who was “famous” for much the same reasons, except that he only saw me in terms of what I could do for him. It was like one of those fairytales where a girl must do something impossible like sorting a room full of different grains. If I managed it — and often I did — he set me a new task that was harder. Nor was I repaid with affection and praise, but my family was not one that did that, so I wasn’t expecting them. The TV reunions in ecstasies of “love” always seem phony to me.
Human beings are physically built to need affection so I slipped into depression and self-annihilation. The shrink they gave me, Dr. Angus, listened to my tale of woe and laughed and laughed at my assumptions. He called my mother, thinking she would arrive to cherish me, but she called me, asking what she should do. It was not like a TV show. I told her to stay away. I don’t know what the doctor said to Scriver, but he eventually came to get me and paid all the bills. He divorced me without my being there, which was possible because he was famous and thought to be rich. He paid all those bills as well.
That was the winter I stayed out on our little Two Medicine ranch with five horses and two cats, slowly becoming real, feeling each day — the filigree of weed shadows on snow, the long faces of the horses watching me through the windows and thundering around the outside to a new window when I changed rooms. I wrote (badly but happily) and drew badly, sitting at the picnic table next to the crackling wood stove. I packed hay and firewood to where they were needed. These months became a new foundation of what happiness could be. When the dirt road became drive-able again, I went back to teaching but had no expectations or aspirations. When I could afford it, I left.
