Knowing that I am a fool keeps the door open to me. Wisdom is the certain knowledge that that there are no certainties; we live within a framework of guarantees that are extended to us by a benign Universe. We however are as children lost in a great forest who occasionally catch glimpses of the sky through the canopy of leaves and branches as they are moved by the actions of a breeze or wind.

I thank the powers that be that I am not subject to the whims of men, a meddlesome and petty tribe whose sole occupation seems to be confounding the smooth running of the natural worlds by whose grace we all exist.

We owe a debt of gratitude to the Great Mother and Father of us all yet we contrive to repay our debt in the most churlish and ignoble manner. We bicker among ourselves and the nation state has come into existence as the acme of interference with the integrity of the individual.  

The option of becoming a hermit is no longer with us as we crawl about the face of our planetary host like a plague, diminishing our possibility by engaging with mediocrity and fetishising the mundane. So we have to engage with this overpopulated, overstuffed, self-important, smug world.

All power to the spirit of benign exploration and promoting that which is best in human life. An optimist is one who sees 0.0000001% of a possibility and says “That’ll do, I’ll take it.”

The most profound state of happiness is achieved by the following means.

To be free to exercise choice and to be able to act upon that choice.

To do meaningful works in an environment where those works are validated by the appreciation of others.

To function within a meritocracy, wherein the individual is accredited their true worth based not upon fiscal, financial or familial position.

To be free of the blight of the cult of celebrity whereby the mundane and meaningless is elevated to the position of venerated article of faith.

To be one of a kinship, a gathering of kind whose collective aim is mutual improvement wherein the object of association is progression of the best in each and thereby development of that which is sacred to each individual as their birthright and that which they hold in custodianship for all the human race.

To be able to celebrate the uniqueness of each person without the pettiness and insecurities that plague human interactions, to allow that person to flourish and evolve in their own right.

It is a step in the right direction, I believe. Freedom from the avalanche of dogmas and ignorance that render us all hamstrung and incapable. Personal liberation allied to personal responsibility must surely be the objective of any sound thinking adult.  

I’ve been corresponding with a man in Houston, Texas who has formed the opinion that I am an apologist for slavery, England’s colonial past and live in an isolated bubble. That is my fault, I have given that impression somehow, though I’m not sure precisely how. My argument was that John Lee Hooker, along with other prominent black musicians, received a better mainstream reception in England in the early 1960s than in the US. Oh boy, that put the cat among the pigeons.

To those of you who know me, this is quite amusing. To any of my former students you might even find it strange but then ever was it so.

What intrigues and fascinates me is the fact that I can actually have a private dialogue with someone occupying a different world to me in a common setting. It is only by celebrating the diversity of each of us as individuals that the human race may move forward or be forever hamstrung by its collective past.

History is simultaneously fascinating and  terrifying. Like the moment when you realise that you are no longer a child and that as a self electing adult you can influence the way that the pendulum swings in human affairs. This is a liberation and a responsibility. We are all responsible for our own actions, thoughts and deeds and free to act as we so choose.

In this context, happiness is the fruit of our endeavours. Its active proselytising is a useful thing on the part of any individual and I acknowledge anyone who by their life’s work seeks to spread enlightenment.

For the record, I don’t condone slavery, apartheid, colonialism, bigotry or any of those parasites upon the body politic of human affairs. However, I don’t bury my head in the sand either and pretend that they don’t exist. The true art to living a life is to not allow those things to take root in oneself, that is the real challenge.

Happiness?

I love Vermeer, things moved through this man that are exquisite. Truly a genius. I thank the powers that be that they have given me faculties to appreciate what Vermeer did and to know of it and to be able to place it within my own mental assembly as a point of reference. We all have something for each other that surpasses the confines of spatial and temporal bounds. Thank you, Jan.

In his dystopian polemic Nineteen Eighty Four, George Orwell described the nightmare of totalitarian society.

In the UK in 2008 we currently have almost eight million CCTV cameras monitoring our every move, from which lane we drive in to which street we walk down and everything that we do there. The argument for such a network has always been the same, if you’ve done nothing wrong you’ve got nothing to be worried about. Most UK citizens now are used to being monitored when they drive, filmed when they make a purchase and recorded as they open a door. Indeed it is estimated that if you are in an urban centre you could be filmed by an average of two hundred cameras in a day.

Who is watching all these feeds? Who is monitoring the screens and for what purpose? Petty villains have realised that all they have to do is wear a hat or pull their ‘hoody’ up and they are anonymous. Nothing has ever been prevented because of CCTV, occasionally it allows us to witness the antecedents of a particular incident but it is often inconclusive and in the case of some atrocity committed by a determined individual it is utterly irrelevant.

So we have given birth to the surveillance society, watchers and watched. In ancient mythology there is reference to the Nephilim or the Watchers, but these beings, magi, angels, call them whatever, are usually characterised by their illumination and benign disposition toward the human race. 

We find ourselves being studied by people far less benign and dramatically less illumined. It creates a precedent and means that the concept of the private citizen or the private individual is eroding rapidly. We are allowing our fears to drive disproportionately the kind of societies we live in. Orwell spoke about thought-crime as the ultimate invasion of the integrity of the private individual, thinking the ‘wrong’ thoughts, thoughts that contradict the party line.

 Any of the world’s thinkers will tell you that privacy is implicit to your well being, personal integrity is a paramount consideration. You were born alone, you will die alone. Reality TV shows and the exponential growth of the cult of celluloid exposure have made public spectacles of us all to the point where we take it for granted at a subliminal level that we are going to be filmed and watched.

It’s a slippery slope, the thin end of a wedge that will be justified with words like security and terror. There is a nasty habit of behavioural norms and laws to protect society from itself being implemented in haste and then staying on the statute books. When we have all forgotten what we were supposed to be filming each other for we will be left with  a legacy of billions of CCTV cameras all over the world, all assuming that there will be some need to gather their evidence for consideration by a jury or worse. I’m reminded of Gil Scott Heron who told us that the revolution would not be televised; it seems that everything will be televised after all, including you scratching your backside.

Fundamental to our evolution as a species is the need to trust and communicate with each other. CCTV is just one example, there are others, of the gradual disintegration of those basic personal liberties.

Happiness? I suppose I feel an obligation to turn it to happiness in some way but it’s a no brainer really; I don’t understand how anyone could feel comfortable knowing that their personal integrity was being compromised for an as yet unproven utilitarian objective.

That’s my opinion, but remember, opinions are like a***holes, everybody’s got one.

There are times of relative quiet and times of relative busyness in world affairs. At the moment the world is behaving like a child with a behavioural disorder. Ominous clouds appear to be rolling across the horizon from all directions, the structure and shape of our world seems to be under pressure from every conceivable angle.

Lessons learned along the way are crucial here. Perspective and context are everything or the alternative is to be the plaything of opinion formers whose objective is to sell copy, win your subscription or whatever it might be. It’s an old cliche now, but I have learned that things only become cliches because they resonate somewhere within us all, they encapsulate a temporary truth almost in a crystalline form. The cliche? Today’s news is tomorrow’s fish and chip paper - if you’re younger or not from the UK, this refers to the time when fish and chips were wrapped in newspaper by the proprietors of the shops that sold these delicacies.

The lesson that grounds me always is to stay located in what’s real. Take a walk in the great church: nature. Immerse yourself in the natural worlds and you will see that despite the social Armageddon the Universe still works its magic. The leaves have just started to fall in significant amounts in this part of the world, the colours are resplendent, reds and golds, the Milky Way is awesome on a clear and chilly night such as we are enjoying here at the moment.

Be humble in the face of it, remember the old adage, people make plans and God laughs. There is no certainty in the world of men and women that is worth basing your life upon yet the natural worlds drip with absolutes and a sense of being-ness.

There’s always been a misplaced desire to master nature on the part of certain character types, show it who’s boss, conquer the wilderness and so on. This gathers momentum when we are going through a cycle of fullness such as we have just experienced and it is easy to forget just what the deal is here. This becomes a kind of collective narcissism, and we start to be seduced by our own feelings of superiority, believe our own hype. Don’t lose sight of it, we are guests here, we are visitors, we didn’t come here to challenge the natural worlds for supremacy.

Everything we need to live a fulfilled and meaningful life, the platform for something more substantial to build upon is here, provided for us by the natural worlds. Responsible stewardship is the way, not total domination.

Choices are the axis around which a self electing life revolves.

 We make choices and stand or fall by the positions those choices place us in. It can be seen that the path you have followed in your life has been defined by the choices that you have made. Significantly it may also be seen that where your life will lead you will be guided by choices you have not yet made.

Strangely enough, the choices you have not yet made are already there, waiting to be actuated by you. How can I say this? It’s quite simple really; we all play roles in our lives. We play roles much as we wear our clothes, they’re not all the same.

There is the professional you, the serious you, the playful you, the dramatist you and many more besides - you could fill a book with the different roles you play. When we are young we do play, children love to play, and what they play is to summon roles that exist in the collective consciousness of all humans and act out according to the role. So young kids might play mummies and daddies, cops and robbers and any number of different character portrayals they have been exposed to.

Over time these roles are absorbed subliminally. Almost as though we wear a path through a virgin territory, and if we consider Descartes description of us as a tabla raisa or a blank slate, that is how it is. We start empty, or at least the character portrayal bank does, and we deposit impressions and situations we have been exposed to in there.

Here is the crucial bit. Over time a critical mass develops and instead of us choosing to play roles, they start to play us. We become consumed by the role and end up doing things, finding ourselves in situations that we had no idea or inclination about. This is the role, it compels us to act in certain ways.

This is why I can make the statement that the decisions you will make are already made for you by the role that you will play. This should be a little disconcerting because it means, if it’s true, that you are not in control of your own life. It means that your time, energy and your faculties have been in a sense held to ransom by the roles you play.

So we get people doing jobs they never wanted to do, marrying people they never wanted to be with, committing themselves to things they don’t really have a compelling relationship with. This leads to disquiet, discord and disharmony. The net result of which is a background noise of things not being quite as they should be.

This does not mean that there is anything wrong with roles, it is saying that you owe it to yourself to be in control of them and to manage them according to the life you want to live rather than struggling to cope with the existence you discover yourself a part of.

The single most difficult thing in life is personal development because it dominates everything you do. Your responses, your choices, your assessment of situations, your understanding, cognizance and perception. The person you are is defined exclusively by the level of personal development you have managed to attain in your life. This is done through intense study of self, modelling the person you are quite literally as a sculptor models a piece of clay or hews a piece of marble.

It is a lifetime’s endeavour and is only ever undertaken thoroughly by the few. It is not for the faint of heart or the weak of will. The world is an arcade of distractions that will allow you to live out a hedonist’s lifestyle without so much as a backward glance. To tackle this requires huge reserves of character and strength, personal integrity and a desire to change and improve what you already have.

I was speaking with a young person today. We talked about characters in computer games, heroes in particular and I asked the young person: ’What compels a hero? What makes them do the things they do?’

He wasn’t sure what I meant so I explained: ‘These guys fight evil, they perform extraordinary feats and so on but why? Why do they do what they do? If they want to save the world, why do they want to do it? What is it about the world that they want to save in particular, because it’s not all good? If they’re defending the weak from some malevolent baddie: why? What drives them? What has been the inciting incident in their life that makes them suddenly change or forces them to make a decision?’

We moved on like this and the young person started to get the idea that people are like they are for some reason, whether it’s a choice they’ve made or a situation they’ve found themselves in that’s backed them into a corner.

That person is you. It’s me. It’s all of us. It’s a component of the human condition.

The decisions we make define who we are. The choices we make determine how we will travel. 

I went on a young offenders prison visit yesterday. There was so much going on that it could be written about for hours. To keep it concise, I asked one of the prison officers with some twenty years experience what had been the major changes in his time.

He said that it was undoubtedly the rise in violent offenders and those involved with substance abuse. He also commented on the increasing diminishment of respect shown toward female members of staff expressed in language and attitude.

This is what is happening in the western world and probably what is to come in the developing world. There is a defecit in self respect, fulfilment, satisfaction, development and subsequently intrinsic happiness.

 image: rayonierwebmaster

Oct 11, 2008 04:30 AM

This from the Toronto Star

Stuart Laidlaw
Faith and Ethics Reporter
When you reflect this Thanksgiving weekend on the good things in life, don’t stop there. Take a hard look at the things that make you unhappy, as well. Then compare the two.

“It has to be honest,” says Ulrich Schimmack, a psychology professor at the University of Toronto who specializes in happiness studies.

Focusing only on the good things, he says, may bring only a fleeting happiness. “You’re getting it at the cost of have a distorted reality. And realism is good.”

Schimmack says Thanksgiving can be a good time for many to really grasp that the good in our day-to-day lives outnumbers the bad.

But Sonja Lyubomirsky of the University of California, another happiness professor, says gratitude is not just for Thanksgiving. She likes the idea of counting blessings so much, it’s worth doing on a regular basis.

“It’s like losing weight. You have to stay on the diet and exercise regularly for it to work,” says Lyubomirsky, author of the bestseller The How of Happiness: A Scientific Approach to Getting the Life You Want.

In her research, Lyubomirsky asked one group of subjects to keep a gratitude journal. For 10 weeks, they regularly jotted down the things they were grateful for – relationships, nice meals, a good day at work. Another group was told to write down daily hassles and annoyances.

The result, not surprisingly, was that members of the grateful group was happier and more optimistic. More than that, however, they spent more time exercising and reported feeling healthier, with fewer headaches, coughing or nausea. They even had less acne – a point Lyubomirsky makes with teenagers.

“Young people have a tendency to take everything for granted,” she says.

Just as Schimmack stresses that gratitude has to be honest, Lyubomirsky says it’s important to pick a strategy for expressing gratitude that works best for you. In another study, she found that subjects told to write in their grateful journals three times a week were less happy than those doing so only once a week.

So, true gratitude can’t be forced.

Schimmack and Lyubomirsky are part of the growing academic focus on happiness. The field has it’s own publication, the Journal of Happiness Studies, Pennsylvania State University has an entire department dedicated to it and mass-market books are hitting the shelves.

There are even several happy blogs, including Lyubomirsky’s, blogs.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-how-happiness and happinessproject.typepad.com, in which author Gretchen Rubin spends a year trying every recipe for happiness she can find.

“It’s really an explosion in the field,” says Schimmack, who was trained in Germany and is based at U of T’s Mississauga campus.

Despite the recent burst of activity, he says happiness studies remain largely misunderstood. Too often, he says, people want simple answers, such as the notion that money can’t buy happiness or that selfish people are truly unhappy. These are gross oversimplifications, he says.

“Do we really believe that Donald Trump is unhappy deep inside? I don’t think so.”

The things that make people happy, even for the antimaterialist, tend to cost money, Schimmack says. Want your family to be healthy? Insurance and a safe car cost money. Enjoy camping? Tents and sleeping bags cost money. Want to send you kids to college? That costs big money.

“A lot of the people who think of their lives as being nonmaterialistic often spend more money than the people who are materialistic,” Schimmack observes.

“People in Canada and the United States will say, ‘Money is not important to me.’

“But the reason for that is, they have it.”

The seminal album by the Doors was called Strange Days. The band took their name from Aldous Huxley’s book The Doors of Perception, essential reading for the postwar generation who were left decidedly underwhelmed by the path that the world had trodden the previous few decades. They set out intending to ‘change’ things and we are too close to know just how history will view their attempts to reconfigure the world.

Strange days was something I thought this morning. My daughter has just completed her MA in Philosophy and Theology and is heading off for a conference in India in a few weeks. So she is getting her vaccinations and the process has left her, understandably, feeling a little bashed around. She asked me if I could take her into work this morning because she was on an early shift, 6.30 am.

It’s a beautiful morning here in England today, windy so the day broke with dramatic splashes of colour and dark clouds blowing across the sky. Driving into the city we spoke about Rabies, she’s having her Rabies vaccination today, the size of the Indian population and how it’s the world capital of Rabies at the moment. We discussed those diseases that have been virtually eliminated from the world, certainly the western world and healthcare in general.

Yesterday I was an advocate for someone in a protracted grievance with a healthcare trust. This involved sitting down around a table and hammering some knotty issues out with the chairman of the trust and some of his top ranking officers. The issues were resolved and I was caught by the building adjoining the one we met in - where we went for a post meeting debrief - which is a brand new state of the art cancer treatment facility. Hugely impressive, atrium, expansive architecture and built for purpose. 

I dropped off my daughter, posted some mail from the night before and got a latte from Starbucks for the drive home. We have great radio here, I listened to Radio 4 which is a talk radio station and the discussion was about the financial crisis we are experiencing. Tokyo’s stock exchange has lost 25% of its value this week, Indonesia has suspended its stock market until things stabilise and there is shock that an essentially western crisis has affected the east so dramatically. Our world, or the one I live in, has become so incredibly sophisticated and complex.

One of the commentators in his voxpop said that traders in Japan have abandoned fundamentals and structures and are basically stampeding for the exits. Curious. Because it is at times like these, when reason heads out the door that strange things can and do happen. Fear is the great debilitator.

So I listened, drove, and sipped my latte as I went against the flow of the traffic and was reminded of the Doors album, Strange Days. Strange indeed, Horatio. Watch this space.