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Fifteenth in my series of talks for the Unitarians -
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The Pursuit of Happiness
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First, I want to read an excerpt from a radical, treasonous, call to rebellion by a bunch of flaming liberal activists for you: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness” Thomas Jefferson mentioned happiness twice in the opening paragraph of the Declaration of Independence. It makes sense, when you consider that most of the people who have immigrated to America in the past 400 years made the journey because they were unhappy about something where they came from. It’s a pretty safe bet that most Americans would agree with Jefferson that they have a natural right to embark upon their own personal quest for happiness. Oddly though, we tend to have a bit less enthusiasm for someone else’s pursuit of happiness if it seems peculiar or immoral to us, or we feel threatened by it in some way. But I’m not here to rant about self-righteous hypocrisy today. Maybe some other time. When I went through my approaching-middle-age what-is-the-meaning-of-life period, I read a lot to find out what some of the deepest thinkers have thought about the route to happiness. Some of these philosophers didn’t seem to be very happy themselves, which may explain why they were so interested in analyzing and identifying where to find it. Voltaire’s “Tale of the Good Brahmin,” which you heard earlier, illustrates the point. The lack of agreement among philosophers and pundits about how to find happiness suggests to me that there is probably no universal recipe to be revealed. But I have remained curious enough to look for examples of the extremes in my fellow humans – the profoundly happy and the terminally sad. A couple of years ago, I went on a job interview that took me through Shreveport, Louisiana, Atlanta, Georgia, Charleston, West Virginia, and Marietta, Ohio. I had been out of work for over four months, and I was sure by then that permanent retirement was neither a financial nor a vocational option for me just yet. I was beginning to worry about the future. I chronicled my observations in my journal when I arrived back home, in a little essay called: Faces in the Crowd The manager of the Hampton Inn in Marietta was a 30ish black man with a round face, gold wire-rimmed glasses, cheerful and friendly, but living in a town where dark-skinned people are as rare as four-leaf clovers. I wondered if he ever went home since he seemed to be there whenever I passed the front desk, day or night. He made no hesitation in recommending a place for dinner when I asked. Just a few miles down the road, located in the dining room of a 200 year-old hotel perched on the bank of the Ohio River, it was just superb. When I returned to the hotel two hours later, my palate satiated, he asked if I had followed his recommendation. I confirmed his excellent gastronomic sensibilities, and he stood tall and leaned back with his thumbs in his pockets, grinning broadly. I described my dinner and told him it was so good I had eaten too much; more than at any meal in the past several months. He laughed and replied, "Good for you," then wished me a very pleasant evening. *** The dinner waitress, a 30ish white woman, was perfectly poised and polished in her role. To engage her in chitchat would be impossible, since it would violate her understanding of proper protocol. This was, after all, the most elegant place in town, and a respectful distance must be maintained. I would learn nothing about her in our two hours of intermittent interactions as she served me. *** The 20-something white man came up to my rent car as I was refilling it with gas in the middle of the day, at a busy intersection on my way to the airport, and he began speaking to me. Surprised, I turned to look and saw his wild eyes as he began gesturing rapidly and pleading with me to give him a ride to where he could "get his medicine", somewhere near the airport. When I told him maybe, thinking he might go away, another man came out of the store and stood by the car, ready to get in the back seat. I turned to look at him and said, "Who are you?" "Oh, I'm with him," he said. I raised my hands, palms out, and said, "Deal's off guys. No rides." About this time, the store attendant, a burly white man came out and stood nearby watching, ready to lend assistance if needed. As the wild-eyed man kept pleading, he finally said, "Leave the lady alone and get out of here." The two men looked at one another and walked away, the first one still very animated and still talking. The attendant went back inside, then said over the speaker at the pumps, "Sorry about that ma'am." I went inside to get a receipt and to thank the man for coming to my aid. It turned out the first man was asking him where the methadone clinic was before he came out to my car. I thanked him again for the help, and he said he was glad to do it. And he was calling the cops if the guy came back. *** A skycap rolled her slowly by in a wheelchair as I sat in the terminal at Chuck Yeager Airport in Charleston waiting on the plane to arrive. She was elderly, white, and had that aristocratic look about her. Her snowy hair was perfectly coiffed, teased and sprayed, and her clothes were definitely not from Wal Mart. Her calm countenance as she sat watching the rain slap the tarmac out the window suggested that she was used to being taken care of, and she had no concern that anyone here would let her down. She waited patiently until the airport people came to pre-board her, one to push the wheelchair, and one to hold the umbrella for her. The flight attendant confirmed that she was connecting in Atlanta to continue on to West Palm Beach, Florida, and that there would be an attendant waiting at the gate there to help her. *** The flight attendant on the first leg of my flight home was a 40ish white woman. She never stopped moving - checking with each of her passengers several times on the 90-minute flight to make sure we each had everything we wanted or needed. And she was doing it all by herself on this 40-passenger Canadair regional jet. I've never felt so cared for on a flight before, and I've flown lots of places. A passenger across the aisle from me told her how great a job she had done as we were deplaning, and the stewardess just beamed. I silently nodded in agreement. *** The counter girl at Wendy's in the Atlanta airport was under twenty, black, and with eyes that telegraphed her raw emotions - anger, resentment, and despair. As she waited on customers, she couldn't hide those feelings, and each customer in the line was clearly relieved to order and pay for their food and get away as quickly as possible from such a profoundly unhappy person. *** The 40ish white man in the seat next to me on my last flight had oiled hair, creased in the front as it was swept forward, then back, like he had just stepped out of a time warp to the 60’s. His eyes were squinty in his slightly puffy, craggy face. His simplest body movements were jerky and exaggerated, like his machismo was just bursting to find something to do with itself. Yet he was friendly, telling me he had been a cop for 12 years, then an airline screener, then quit that boring job to go into private security to try it out. I thought for awhile that maybe he was one of those new post-9/11 air marshals, sitting in the last row there with me, but he bought a Coors Light when the flight attendant came by, and I couldn't see any loose clothing where he might hide a gun. He was restless though, like he was searching for something, or chafing in some private constraint. Perhaps he was looking for fulfillment, a thing that might forever elude him. *** I didn't see the uniforms since my seat was in the very back of the plane. But just before we were to land, I saw some fellow passengers talking with a young man with almost no hair, just a few rows up. I heard him say "two weeks", which caused me to look up and see the desert camouflage of his shirt. When we landed, the flight attendant picked up her mike and announced that we had two soldiers on board, with two weeks leave from Iraq, and would we other passengers mind letting them off first, to honor them for their service to our country. We all spontaneously applauded. One was a white man, one a black woman, both around twenty years old. They both looked slightly lost and uncertain. But when we got to the gate, they stood up and walked off with heads held high. I passed the young man once more on the way to the baggage claim, now reunited with his young wife and baby. One of the security screeners, a heavyset black woman, flashed a big smile and yelled across the corridor as they passed, "You two have two weeks, so you be sure and take good care of each other." Not far behind, the young-woman soldier headed down the escalator alone. I wondered if there would be any welcoming party for her. ***** It was my fault for reading the F. Scott Fitzgerald stories on the plane going out. He paints with eloquent words, producing portraits of people whose lives are altered by fate, which we all know is sometimes cruel and sometimes kind. His characters run the gamut from the arrogant, callous young and wealthy elite to the street-roaming alcoholic, whose only thought is where that next bottle is coming from. The images were so vivid, I suppose it was my subconscious that began finding and sorting the people I encountered in my travels, the ones who stood out as unique faces in the crowd. I couldn't stop myself from guessing at their past and future, based simply on seeing their present. All those characters - where were they headed, and why? My
best guesses: It is those last two that puzzle me the most. What went wrong to cause them to get on the down escalator of life? Can they get off before it's too late? What would it take to turn them around? I mentioned age, gender and race in each case to make the point that although those things can be a temporary advantage or disadvantage, they didn't seem to be a barrier to those two whose future seemed brightest to me. Those two exuded self-confidence and were fully engaged in their work and in the people around them. They were enjoying life. That energy and positive outlook is infectious. I want to be around people like that. What did they have that the counter girl and the methadone man lacked? Was it in their nature or their nurture? Could those latter two ever overcome it? Self-esteem is such a tenuous thing, sometimes tarnished, and sometimes gilded by the vagaries of fate. Yet some people seem to bounce back and rebuild themselves after the most severe storm passes through their lives, and others struggle their entire lives to build anything at all. I don't know why. A couple of months after the interview trip, still jobless; I had another opportunity to make some observations. This one I called: Life on the Cheap I've lived long enough now to have personally experienced all sorts of economic "modes of existence," and, I've had plenty of opportunity to observe others as well. Relative wealth, or the lack of it, can have a powerful influence on a person's sense of self worth, but it is by no means a direct relationship. A recent experience reminded me of this. We live in the country, so our lawn is on the large side, around 1.5 acres, and as you all know, the long Texas summers make the grass grow for about eight months of the year. All that heavy use finally wore out the engine on our 17-year-old riding mower around the middle of last summer. Well to be completely honest, it didn’t help that I let it get low on oil, either. In direct contradiction to the expectations of our modern consumer culture, I was determined to not spend $1000 on a new mower when most of the old one was still working just fine, thank you. Part of my obstinacy was the money, part of it was that I am just temperamentally stubborn, but mostly it was the principle of the thing. Machinery should be durable and fixable. I'm part of the secret resistance to the Great American Disposable-Everything culture. When the old mower engine started vibrating and overheating, I called our local lawn-mower repairman, who has been working on small engines of all sorts since I was a kid, in the same old run-down building where you can barely walk on the narrow pathways through the heaps of dead weed whackers, chain saws, and lawn mowers. I asked him if it was worth repairing one of these old engines. He works pretty cheap, and he’s fixed several things for us over the years, but he told me he doesn't do major overhauls on small engines any more, since it costs more than buying a new one. I asked if he had any low cost ideas, and he suggested looking around for a used engine. And so I did. After watching ads in the local papers for awhile with no luck, it occurred to me that you can find anything on e-bay. After losing out on several 11 HP engine auctions when the bid price went above my $100 self-imposed limit, patience finally paid off, and I won an auction. Since the seller lived within driving distance, I also avoided $40 in UPS shipping charges. We hopped in the car the following Saturday armed with a crisp Franklin and a freshly printed Yahoo map, and headed north. The seller lived in a singlewide trailer house out in the piney woods of rural southern Arkansas, several miles east of Texarkana. All manner of pieces and parts were scattered about the yard, like carcasses and bones in a lawn mower graveyard. He told me that he buys used lawn equipment from all over the area and resells the useful parts on e-bay. This provides a supplemental income when his main business, septic tank cleaning, is in a slump. I've always enjoyed talking to people who don't work for big companies, perhaps because I’ve always yearned to be independent, but couldn’t figure out any way to match my income on my own. In corporations, the money is good, security is high, but freedom is very limited, and rules are king. There seem to be people who like the highly structured 8 to 5 environment, but there are a lot who don't. This erstwhile junk-man / septic-tank-cleaner struck me as that latter sort. Skeptical about the profit potential for used mower parts, I began quizzing him about his business plan (though I didn't call it that). He said that there were lots of old lawn mowers around, and he runs ads in local papers offering to haul them off for free for people who don't want them anymore. Most of the mowers he finds still run just fine, or at least the engines do. He figured that most people buy new ones on impulse when they get tired of the old one, or something minor goes wrong, not because they really need one. It's apparently hard for a lot of men to walk by that row of shiny new lawn machines gleaming in the sun at the local Wal Mart without feeling the ownership itch. When they break down and buy the new one, they have something they don't need any more and the wife doesn't want it taking up space. But as they say, one man's trash is another's treasure. Curious still, I asked about logistics and costs, namely his traveling around to pick up parts and his packing and shipping, not to mention the value of his time. He said he spent a good deal of time on the computer setting up his e-bay auctions and answering questions from potential buyers. He also said that although hauling in dead mowers, breakdown of parts, and packaging for shipment took some time; he figured he'd just as soon be doing something useful as wasting time watching TV. Like most entrepreneurs I’ve met, he happily filled up all his available hours with moneymaking schemes of some sort. As any good businessperson knows, the secret to financial success is to make sure your revenues always exceed your costs. I think it would be safe to say that he and his family have a low-cost lifestyle. Thus, by the measure of net cash flow, they appear to be financially successful, though far from wealthy. While I was talking to him, I kept thinking that if I met this man on the street, I would assume based on his appearance that he had never even used a computer, much less had any business acumen. I always look forward to my daily lesson on the danger of assuming things. Although I didn't come out and ask, this entrepreneur struck me as upbeat and content with life. When I consider that his net worth is probably less than zero, it is yet another demonstration that for most people; the relationship between material wealth and happiness is not at all a direct one. This man (and his family) lives life on the cheap, but nobody tells him how to live it. He makes his way in the world by the fruits of his labors and his wits. And therein is the lesson: Wealth can provide comfort, security, and even improved health, but happiness comes from somewhere else. Back in the fifties, psychologist Abraham Maslow proposed a hierarchy of human needs and motives to explain how we humans are motivated. If you think of it as building a pyramid, you have to build from the bottom up. The lower levels of the pyramid are deficiency needs, and the upper levels are growth needs. Each lower level must be completed in turn before the higher levels can be completed. At the base of the pyramid is biological need, such as food and water. I’ve never seen a picture of a starving person who looked happy. Next up is safety and security; the knowledge that we won't be harmed, that we have a roof over our heads and a place to keep warm. This is the level that defines the minimum level of wealth compatible with happiness. The next layer is love and belonging. I would expand the love level into three components, love of self, love for others, and love by others. With love in place, the next level, self-esteem can be built. This is where we become competent at something, are recognized as such, and gain the approval of others. I suspect that the unfortunate counter girl I met in the Atlanta airport was stuck somewhere down below this level. Finally at the top of the pyramid, Maslow placed the growth need - self-actualization. Self-actualized people are characterized by:
Many years later, Maslow revised the top of his pyramid to insert two levels of growth before the self-actualization level. First, there was the cognitive level - the need to know, to understand, and to explore. Above that was the aesthetic level, the need to appreciate symmetry, order, and beauty. As he reached old age, Maslow added a new top level to his pyramid of motives, which he called self-transcendence. This was the need to connect to something beyond the ego or to help others find self-fulfillment and realize their potential. It seemed to him that this is also when we begin to acquire wisdom. Thinking back about the individuals I described earlier, the two who were most obviously happy and content with their lives were also the two who thoroughly enjoyed helping other people. By Maslow’s scheme, they were already self-actualized and self-transcendent. A common mistake, particularly of young people, is to become focused on seeking pleasure, believing that this is the route to happiness. Don’t get me wrong, pleasure can be good, and is probably necessary in some amount. But pleasure is fleeting, and overexposure can lead to obsession which dominates our lives and ultimately leaves us empty and confused when we just can’t get enough. Think of the methadone man. I can easily recall the times in my adult life when I have felt the highest level of sustained contentment, which is about as close as I can come to a definition for happiness. For example, when I quit my first professional job after three years to go to graduate school, I can remember being blissfully happy for the next month. It was absolute, complete freedom at last. I was taking the necessary steps to leave a profession and a company that had turned out to be dull and uninspiring. We were poor by most standards for those two years, living on my $6200 per year research stipend and food from the WIC program. Our weekly entertainment was to walk up the hill and across the street and splurge on a pitcher of beer at the café when they had live music on Sunday afternoons. Those were some of the happiest years in my memory. I was on the way to self actualization. When I finished grad school and began working again, I liked my new profession so much that I worked far more than 40 hours per week, at the same time as designing and building our house. Eventually, my superiors at work entrusted me with positions of responsibility for large groups of other people, and I found that mentoring and helping them to achieve their individual and group potentials was even more satisfying than the intellectual rewards from the technical work I so enjoyed. I suppose I was experiencing what Maslow calls self-transcendence. And finally, when a friend and coworker took me on my first wilderness trip into the mountains some 28 years ago, I finally found the spiritual connection to something much larger than myself that all the years of attending church as a child had failed to provide. I now consider my annual wilderness sojourns a necessary component of my happiness. In spite of conditions that are always physically demanding and weather that is sometimes harsh, they are so spiritually uplifting that the good feeling stays with me for the rest of the year. For me, this is the top of the pyramid.
At the risk of disappointing you, I don’t have any specific route to happiness to offer anyone else, but I do encourage everyone to think about Maslow’s pyramid. If you find yourself stuck on one of the lower levels, do something about it. You are fortunate to live in a free country. The pursuit of happiness is your right, and if you aren’t there yet, only you can do something about it.
6/5/05 |
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Last Update 6/6/05 |