Reflections on Happiness

Several of my Facebook friends have expressed interest in my WR 121 course where the focus of the course is on the question of happiness.

After two weeks, none of my students have been asked to develop their own understanding of happiness.  Our work so far has been reading other writers' and thinkers' ideas.  I'll find out a lot more about what my students have read when their first essay comes in this weekend.  The essay looks at a view of happiness they found in their research of the question in relation to a view of happiness found in an article we all read.

The article we all read is from the Jan/Feb, 2001 issue of Psychology Today.  It's entitled, kind of absurdly, "Secrets of Happiness". 

It's not a particularly complicated piece.  In it, Steven Reiss explains how a liver transplant operation woke him up.  He began to examine what his life's meaning is and, more to the point, what his sources of happiness are.

He classifies two basic kinds of happiness:  pleasure (or feel good) based happiness and happiness based on living out one's values.

He differentiates between the two in terms of duration.  Happiness experienced through pleasure has a short duration whereas happiness experienced through living out one's values is much more enduring.

Reiss ends his article by saying that possibly the most enduring source of happiness is the practice of some kind of spirituality.  He regards spirituality as the great equalizer.  If a person finds happiness in spirituality, it doesn't matter how many things the person has or whether the person is good looking or what kind of status the person has.  The happiness one feels practicing spirituality is not dependent upon one's looks or wealth or status.  It's based on something entirely enduring.

I've only heard from a few students regarding their research and I've enjoyed what they've reported so far.

For example, happiness is not always a value-based matter nor is it always spiritual.  Those suffering from Seasonal Affective Disorder need sunshine or some other form of light.  It's a physical and chemical reality.  This fact complicates the question of happiness.

Two of my students have read an article pointing out that the person who experiences happiness but avoids or shuts out melancholy or sadness will not be as happy as the person who feels both the painful and the good feeling aspects of life.  I haven't read this article yet, but it's my opinion that experiencing the full range of life's emotions sharpens them all.  It's not that we can't know happiness without sadness, but more a matter that we humans are wired to feel and experience the full spectrum of life and the full spectrum includes sadness, fear, anxiety, anger, and disappointment every bit as much as happiness.  

While it's true that money can't buy the full experience of happiness, another student of mine has read an article about how money contributes mightily to happiness by giving one the means to provide what's essential for physical survival.   Without proper health care, food, shelter, and other necessities, it's difficult to even talk about happiness, value-based or based on feeling good.

So far, I'm happy with the different dimensions of this question that are coming to life.  It's inexhaustible.  I don't think the question can ever be definitively answered and I'm happy to be teaching a course that doesn't look for definitive or absolute answers, but that explores the many ways thinker and writers view this question.

Our next move will be to read Dan O'Brien's Buffalo for the Broken Heart.  While this book is, on one level, a look at ranching practices and what impact non-native animals, like cattle, have on land they are not native to, the book is also Dan O'Brien's own search for happiness and that's what we'll be working to understand.  When Dan O'Brien is miserable, why is he?  What are the nature of the changes he makes in his life and how do these changes contribute to his happiness?

Three Beautiful Things: 11/19-21/08: Jeff, Rumi, Stacey: Three Keys to the Noble Life

1. Jeff and I have been friends for twenty-two years, ever since our days together as graduate students at the University of Oregon. We have traveled a lot of miles together to go hear a lot of music: Grateful Dead, Zero, Richard Thompson, Renegade Saints, Nine Days Wonder, Crosby,Stills, and Nash, Floydian Slips, and a lot of music and music talk passes between us, especially at LCC where we are both English instructors. This whole week has been one of our most robust in music talk: conversations about David Gilmour, the rest of Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, Bob Dylan, Zero, but the best talk has been about the great pleasure we get from the Grateful Dead. If there were doctoral degrees in Grateful Deadness, Jeff would have earned one long ago and he's generous with his knowledge (it's all about the music, not the Scene), happily shares his recordings, and puts up with me dropping by his office almost every day to talk about the ways the Grateful Dead made music and the many musicians who are part of the Grateful Dead family tree and jam band tradition. The Grateful Dead kicks the hell out of Paxil as an anti-depressant!

2. Rumi.

If anyone wonders how Jesus raised the dead,
don’t try to explain the miracle.
Kiss me on the lips.

Like this. Like this.

I haven't been writing as much here on my blog lately because I've been devoting as much time and energy as I can to reading student writing and trying to help my students in their work. This is the best part of the term: in my World Literature class, my students are able to write with more feeling and depth about what we are reading and this week has been a particularly happy one for me as I read my students' diving into the mysteries of Rumi.

3. Stacey said in class Tuesday night that her way to live a noble life is to act upon the kindness and compassion that rises inside her when she remembers that we are all dying. She didn't mean this in a morbid way and last night in WR 121, we spent over an hour discussing Stacey's insight and I left class buoyed, with the highest regard for my students' intelligence and their longing to learn more about living a noble life and putting what they learn into practice. My gratitude has to go out to Dan O'Brien for the way he explores this idea in Buffalo for the Broken Heart. I'm sorry to see our study of this book come to an end.

Three Beautiful Things 11/18/08: Noble Life, Zero Tribute, Bootleg Dylan

1. I deeply enjoyed my evening WR 121 class's discussion of what it means to live a noble life in response to Dan O'Brien's exploration of the same in Buffalo for the Broken Heart.

2. I purchased and downloaded the 08/08/08 Zero tribute concert to Martin Fierro, their lyrical and mirthful saxophone player who died March 13. Listening to "Gregg's Eggs" and "Catalina" and "Horses" and other tunes took me back thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen years ago to WOW Hall or to the Hilton Ballroom and night after night of improvisational jam jazz rock blues with Zero and the long, often dreamy meditations of Martin Fierro, as well as his playful antics with windup toys and verbal nonsense. If I could go back in time and relive any concerts from my past life, I'd go back to those great nights on the floor of the packed WOW Hall with Zero.

3. I fired up my pathetically tiny MP3 player with thirty-nine tracks from Bob Dylan's "Tell Tale Signs, the eighth volume of his bootleg releases. Dylan is old. I've never enjoyed him more. The gravity and weariness and depth of his aging voice makes his singing more accessible to me. He genuinely sounds at time deeply vulnerable and at other times he sounds like a wizened sage.

Three Beautiful Things 11/13/08: Trance, Satisfaction, Joy

1. I felt myself move into a new dimension of consciousness as I tried to explain to my students how Dan O'Brien's efforts to restore his Broken Heart ranch by raising buffalo had the effect of restoring his soul, of moving more deeply into living a noble life. I wondered if my students could tell that, because I feel Dan O'Brien's experience was so profound, I fell into a trance in front of them in class.

2. My World Lit students' ten minute reflections on the Coleman Barks/Rumi videotape were arresting, stimulating, admirable, insightful, energetic, gratifying . . . .

3. When Melissa learned that her essay on joining the Army becoming the way she lost her pursuit of the American dream had earned the maximum seventy points, her chin quivered, her chest shook, her stomach somersaulted, and a huge smile covered her face.

Three Beautiful Things 11/13/07: Mormons, Tight Writing, Noble Cattle Ranching

1. My 10:00 WR 121 class got into a loud discussion, voices yelling across the room, about whether the Mormon church sanctions adult men having sex with thirteen year old girls. It was pretty funny as three lapsed Mormons worked to explain to one student who had heard this was the case with Mormons that he was wrong.

2. I enjoyed, probably more than my students did, reading passages from Buffalo for the Broken Heart just what a mindful writer Dan O'Brien is, especially when it comes to structuring his book and working to make each piece of it, paragraph by paragraph, hold together.

3. While discussing Buffalo for the Broken Heart, we've discussed Dan O'Brien's criticisms of cattle ranching and Joleen talked about her upcoming essay which is a discussion of her mother's side of the family. They have been cattle ranchers for five generations on land near Weiser, Idaho. She explaining in her paper that theirs is a noble undertaking. I was proud of Joleen. She was risking disapproval. I was proud of my students. They listened intently to her and some might have had ugly thoughts about cattle ranching made more complicated, thanks to Joleen.

Three Beautiful Things 11/08/07: A-OK, Corruption, Stellar Students

1. My good friend and faithful Kellogg Bloggin reader, Bridgit, emailed me today and wondered if I was having troubles because I hadn't posted on my blog for a few days. It was very thoughtful of her to ask and, happily, I reported that I've been busy with school and reading and for the first time since I started this blog, I took a few days off.

2. I finished Timothy Egan's remarkable and unsettling book "Breaking Blue". It was a perfect book for my tastes in reading. It was a Spokane and the Inland Empire history book; it was a book about conscience and the remarkable ways that long-held work on the human soul and body; it is a book about the lawless ways of the area where I was born and raised, ways that I find fascinating, if not mysterious.

3. In both my WR 121 sections today, students wrote analysis essays about Dan O'Brien's remarkable book "Buffalo for the Broken Heart" and then discussed the content of their papers. I am still ecstatic about the shrewd and sensitive insights my students have into this book and how beautifully they articulated them. Their sophisticated and deep thinking is a source of great joy.

Three Beautiful Things 10/30/07: Man Crush, Perspectives, Coffee

1. We are reading Dan O'Brien's Buffalo for the Broken Heart in WR 121. I was part of a group that had lunch with him last spring. Should I have told my evening class that I had a slight man crush on him? These sorts of bordering on inappropriate things just spill out of me when I'm feeling relaxed with my students, but then I think, "God. Should I have said that?" I did say it. And, to me, it was beautiful!

2. I really enjoyed listening to my students discuss the ecological perspective Dan O'Brien brings to ranching and seeing it in contrast to the commercial/commodity perspective that prevails.

3. I really like this one cafeteria employee at LCC. This evening she was stopping customers from going forward at the espresso bar to protect the baristas' quit time and working to ensure they didn't miss their bus. When she found out all I wanted was a coffee and not an espresso drink, she let me go to the bar. I also asked about her weekend snowboarding at Mt. Hood. She had a great time.

Three Beautiful Things 10/26/07: Ranching, Mining, Taking Over

1. I've returned to the wonderful story of Dan O'Brien getting bit by the buffalo ranching bug in his thoughtful and poetic memoir "Buffalo for the Broken Heart."

2. Jo and I had an email exchange which opened my eyes to the fact of coal and lead mining in Missouri, a mining state I had never thought of before.

3. Discussion in WR 121 turned toward the riveting reality of class members who never really knew their childhoods or adolescence because they had to assume the adult responsibilities of absent or overworked or addicted parents.

Three Beautiful Things 05/03/07: Authentic, Praise, Pert

Good morning JK!

1. Writer Dan O'Brien gave an inspiring reading from his book Buffalo for the Broken Heart and then was a most genuine, authentic, appreciative, and generous guest at a lunch that mostly students and two of us faculty attended. I was happy to be able to invite two of my students and they enjoyed very much sharing the lunch table with such a fine writer and a good man.

2. It's always gratifying and reassuring to have a student hang around class for a minute after the other students leave express appreciation for the course: both Carol and Dee did so tonight and I was especially grateful because they loved studying Catch-22 which has become one of my favorite novels ever.

3. An old friend of my father's emailed me today to tell me how my father got his nickname "Pert". I never knew it was derived from my Uncle Harry telling him in the shower at the YMCA that he had a "Dirty Pecker" which got changed to "Perty Decker" and was shortened to Pert.