When the Dog Bites

Where do parking tickets fit in the whole idea of being switched-on?  Sprained ankles on the first day of holiday?  Being horrendously late for your child’s school performance? These are all things that have happened to me recently…the normal stuff of life, I dare say (OK, maybe more organized parents wouldn’t have screwed up their daughter’s school performance time).  They’re not difficulties compared to serious illness or real loss, but they’re the kind of thing that can shade a day into grey and make one feel more irritated or guilty than alive and engaged.

I’ve been thinking about this issue on and off for a while, and it came up for me yesterday when I accidentally smashed a beautiful antique plate that belongs to a friend.  I felt sick about it.  You can tell me that people are more important than things and I would agree with you wholeheartedly…but it was still awful.  It seems to me that our actions are portrayals of our feelings, so to break the plate signals indifference and carelessness when in fact I feel anything but.  But accidents happen.

So where does the idea of the beauty of feeling alive fit here?  Is the goal to feel switched-on most of the time, but accept that there will be times when we just feel crummy?  Or do we try to get through the crummy stuff by intentionally doing things that will restore us to feeling alive and uplifted?

The answer is probably both.  One thing I know for sure though is that our “cultural scripts” for moving through hardship tend not to be very useful.  Traditionally, we are encouraged either to be stoic (“suck it up”) or to try to rise above it all by a sheer act of will (“let it go”).  This is the kind of Nietzchean claptrap debunked in All Things Shining.  It’s pervasive though, so much a part of our culture that its heavy hand is invisible.  Think of the lyrics of the song from which I’ve stolen this title, “I simply remember my favourite things, and then I don’t feel so bad.”  It’s a nice idea, and brown paper packages tied up with string are delightful, but you get the underlying message:  you ought to be able to think your way out of anything.

Here’s a different idea: try experiencing your way out of negative feelings.  Yesterday, I was in a funk about having let down my friend by breaking her plate all morning.  Then, around lunchtime, I happened to hear an exquisite piece of music on the radio:  a new recording of Bach’s St. John Passion produced jointly by Les Voix Baroques and the Arion Baroque Orchestra.  It was so beautiful, and somehow so unexpected, that I pulled over by a park and just listened to it.  I didn’t have to will myself to get some perspective, it gave me perspective.

A plate is just a plate, even when it’s antique and beautiful.  My friend will still love me;  I will still love my friend.  I will try to have it fixed, or to find something as elegant and lovely to replace it.  I gain nothing by wallowing in guilt.  Living is something else.  And living is the goal.

Of course, you also have to be able to forgive yourself…for doing something stupid, for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, or for doing whatever you perceive your transgression to be.  I am extremely gifted at punishing myself, and I recently caught myself trying to instill exactly the same trait in my children.  Now, children need to learn feel remorse (we don’t want to raise little sociopaths) and we all need to be able to express it.  But by the same token, there’s remorse, there’s atonement, and then there’s remembering to live.  Pain and guilt might make you feel alive, in a way, but they’re never uplifting and they’re never gifts to others.  Some experiences pain us, some heal us.  So when the dog bites, don’t just think of your favourite things, go live them.

Accept Gifts

Every long weekend is good, and spectacular weather is great, but the two put together are a gift. We just celebrated Thanksgiving here in Canada.  Those of us lucky enough to live in Toronto had three days of brilliant sunshine and highs of 25˚ Celsius.  On the holiday Monday, my family and I took one of the tiny ferries to Ward Island in Lake Ontario.  The Toronto Islands are only a ten minute ride from downtown Toronto, but they feel a world apart.  There are paths all along the water, playgrounds, playing fields, picnic sites and parks.  Moored yachts glow in anticipation of future sails.  There are virtually no cars allowed on the islands, so we ambled contentedly in a Venice-like quiet, half-dazed by the good fortune of warm weather, time and such a lovely place to enjoy them both.  Strangers smiled at us and we smiled back.

We ate a picnic on the boardwalk, "feasting" (Jamie's word) on walnuts and new season Macintosh apples.  Then we went to the beach itself, where brave hearts were actually swimming.  In October!  We rolled up our trousers and waded in.  We collected rocks for Jamie’s growing collection.  We did a terrible job of trying to teach our Mira how to long- jump in the sand, laughing at our own ineptitude and relishing what would undoubtedly be the last feel of warm sand under our feet for the season.

The day was a gift and I was grateful for it.  This gratitude would no doubt win the approval of a growing coterie of thinkers and writers who tell us that we ought to “practice gratitude” as part of creating a happy and meaningful life.  (In the not so very distant past, of course, this practice was more or less built into culture through organized religion and community rituals, like Thanksgiving itself.  Now, it seems, we’re left to our own devices to figure it out.)  And yet, while these writers’ hearts might be in the right place, in fact I think much of the writing about gratitude is banal.  It conceptualizes gratitude as a sort of generalized thankfulness for stuff and fails to spell out what it actually demands of us.

But gratitude does demand something of us, and it’s in meeting those demands that its power to uplift and create meaning is fulfilled.

First, gratitude asks that we see the special – even sacred - moments of existence as gifts, as Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly discuss in All Things Shining.  In other words, our extra day, warm weather, and access to the Toronto Islands weren’t just nice little bonuses, they were specific gifts for which to be grateful.  Sure they were products of calendars, meteorological phenomena and public policy, but they added up to something rare and special, and they created a memory for us to keep.

Gratitude also demands that we recognize and accept gifts when they come to us.  After all, we perceive a person who overlooks a gift we give them, or who returns it for something else as at least a little ungrateful.  Friends made comic hay out of this with Ross’s devastation upon learning (at Thanksgiving no less) that Rachel has exchanged a gift he gave her for store credit, leading to this exchange:

Rachel: Ross, could you pass me the yams? Ross: Sure. Oh, and Joey's got the mashed potatoes if you want to exchange them.

Rachel’s behaviour is so funny because we all get how obnoxious it is to give a gift and have someone not appreciate it.  But how many times do we overlook subtle gifts that present themselves?  The sunny day, the storm of autumn leaves fluttering down, the found hour to read, the cake that’s risen perfectly, the person who lets you in when traffic is heavy, the good sleep, the perfect cup of coffee, the written letter from a friend:  do we accept these as gifts, or barely note them in passing?  Theoretically, recognizing and accepting gifts would ask that we all slow down a bit, but that’s not exactly realistic for me, and I doubt it is for anyone else out there.  But we all can cultivate a kind of attentiveness and readiness to action that means that we accept them when they come.

And here’s a thornier part of gratitude:  gratitude implies that we are grateful to someone or something.  Gifts come from somewhere.  So where does one direct that gratitude?  When someone writes you a letter, it’s straightforward:  you direct gratitude at the sender.  However, when the gift is a sunny day, it gets a bit trickier.  Some will say they direct their gratitude to “the universe”, but I frankly have no way of conceptualizing the universe that makes it realistic for me to thank it for a warm autumn day.  Those of us who have a system of faith have a readymade answer:  God, or perhaps the gods.  But if you do not have faith in a divinity that gives gifts, it may be enough simply to acknowledge that a gift has come from somewhere.  Conceding, even celebrating, that there might be an agent of origin outside of ourselves, even if it simply lies in the nature of the thing itself, deepens our relationship with the gift.  We are blessed, not just lucky.

And this is ultimately the point.  People give gifts for three reasons:  to establish and deepen relationships, to create webs of obligation and to mark occasions.  It’s through these dimensions, not just “feeling grateful”, that our gratitude for the gifts we receive adds meaning and fulfilment to our lives.  Gratitude helps us to deepen our relationship to the giver and even to the gift itself, to feel a sense of obligation in return for receiving the gift, and to recognize and mark a special moment in time that stands out from the rush of everyday life.

So accept gifts.  See them when they’re offered, enjoy them, celebrate their nature and their role in your life, and think about what they bind you to.

Shine On

“…Joy makes you more intensely you.”  Isn’t that a provocative – even beautiful - thought? It’s a line that I have not been able to get out of my head since reading it in All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age, by Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly.  To be fair to the authors, I am taking it out of context.  In the original passage, the authors are actually contrasting two different modes of spiritual engagement, bliss, which leads to disengagement from the world, and embodied joy, which leads to reengagement with it.  Their premise is that a fulfilled life stems from engagement with the world, which enables us to find joy and wonder in shining things, that is, things and practices that are meaningful to us.

I’ve been meaning to write about ATS for some time as it’s a remarkable book, one that could have been custom-made for this whole enterprise of switching-on.  Indeed, I first heard about it when a very well-read friend of mine, in response to my description of this research, said, “Hmm, I think you ought to read a book called All Things Shining.”  The problem has been that the book is so rich, and there is so much one could say about it, that it’s been hard to know where to start.  However, even as I was mulling this over, I read that ATS was getting released in paperback today, so it seemed that I just needed to get over it and say that if the topics I’ve been writing about here speak to you at all, then you should go out and buy it.

To me, ATS is a beautiful book because it rejects the sort of nihilistic arguments that say either that there is no meaning in the world at all, or that any meaning we can generate has to get there through an imposition of our own mind and will.  They basically say straight up that that’s simply too hard….  We are but mortal, how can we possibly hope to rise above every situation and find in it a level of meaning that makes our life worthwhile?

Dreyfus and Kelly suggest instead that the world is already replete with meaning and that the human task is to pay close attention to the nature and substance of things, and to invest in cultivating deep insight into the things that matter to us, in order to find it.  They provide some examples of this, but they also call upon readers to experiment, to see how and where they are deeply attracted to developing skilled and differentiated knowledge, because what “shines” may vary from one person to the next.  “If we are to be humans beings at all, we must distinguish ourselves from others;  there must be moments where we rise up out of the generic and banal and into the particular and skilfully engaged.”  One way of conceptualizing this is Homer’s polytheism, in which certain gods might speak to or “call” given mortals who are especially attuned to them, but however one thinks of it, one of the beautiful sensibilities here is that one finds insight, meaning and self-knowledge through engagement, not through a sort of endless exploration of the self.  This has a powerful appeal for me, and seems to be at the core of the switching-on project.

But you should just read the book.  Because Dreyfus and Kelly tell their story by guiding the reader through some of the great Western classics, you get fresh insight into the works themselves as well as coming to understand how our current sensibilities evolved.  It’s so easy to take our assumptions for granted;  understanding where they came from helps us understand the different options lives that are really available to us, options that can help us live shining lives.

In the Water, off the Dock: Perfecting Something You Can’t Get Better At

My son Jamie and I were exploring, and we made our way down to a seldom used dock by the cottage.  We pushed aside the spider webs that floated above it (the spider webs there are so ubiquitous there they seem to attach themselves to the very air), and enjoyed the first bounce of buoyancy as our weight hit the wood.  Jamie, captivated by the sensation, jumped and rocked from side to side, testing just how far he could tilt the dock and send the water whooshing out from underneath us.  Of course I joined him.  It’s been a few years, to say the least, since I played on a dock, but it’s pretty irresistible once you start. Eventually we tired of this and walked down to the end of the dock to peer over the edge.  Jamie proceeded to plunk himself down, take off his shoes, and drop his feet into the water.  Now, this is a two year old who can’t swim, so I dove for him, fearing that he was about to jump into the water.  But not a bit of it:  he just wanted to put his feet in the water.  Once I calmed down, I realized Jamie was on to a good thing.  Still holding on to him (safety first!), I took my own shoes off, sat down beside him, and put my feet into the cold water.

The water was so clear that we could clearly see the gently rounded, algae covered rocks underneath us.  There was also some sort of mysterious mesh thing, perhaps a long abandoned trap of some kind.  And, once the water settled down after all our activity on the dock, a timid school of minnows ventured to swim right by our feet.

I thought there was something enchanting about the fact that Jamie instinctively seemed to “get” the pleasure of dangling one’s feet off a dock.  Of course, it’s possible that he was just copying something he’d someone else do, but even if that were the case, he certainly didn’t hesitate.  He knows fun when he sees it.

As we sat there, watching the minnows and dragonflies (and keeping an eye out for the vicious horseflies that were around, in case you think this is getting too bucolic), it occurred to me that this was an experience of fun that we don’t need to work at.  You can’t get better at dangling your feet off the dock.  That is, I could perhaps have snorkelled down and figured out what the mesh thing was, and perhaps figured out exactly what kind of fish the minnows were, but I was never going to improve my feet-dangling skills.  Jamie, at two, already had just as much mastery over this experience as I – or anyone – was ever going to have.

This got me wondering how much room we make for this kind of fun in our lives.  It can seem these days that our approach to fun has been absorbed into a cultural paradigm that values mastery and competence so much that we unconsciously seek it in all dimensions of our lives.  If we enjoy something, we should strive be good at it!  We need to push ourselves, “take it to the next level”, test ourselves in a marathon rather than just run for fun, master French cooking, not just a soufflé.  And the few exceptions to this mostly seem tied to fun as consumption or entertainment, where the fun is being served up to us in the form of a trip to Disneyland, a movie, or some equivalent, where we can’t really get better at it, but then in some respects, we’re not really doing “it” in the first place.

The sociologist Micki McGee has said that we live in a self-help culture, one in which a fundamental insecurity is driving us to turn our lives into constant quests for self-improvement.  I think she’s right, and that this modality has colonized fun, so that it’s one more thing to be good at and the things that we find fun one more thing to master.

Let it be said that there’s every reason to believe that mastery and are profoundly important to human well-being.  Mental health experts say that they promote confidence and well-being and are crucial for building a healthy sense of self, one that is resistant to the doubts and self-loathing that are the bedfellows of depression.  Likewise, in his recent book Drive, author Daniel Pink says that mastery is one of the rare true motivators in life and suggests that companies that want to succeed should find a way to build opportunities for mastery into their work processes.  And, perhaps even more intriguingly, in their terrific book All Things Shining:  Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age, philosophers <a title="All Things Shining Blog" href="" target="_blank">Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly suggest that a sort of version of mastery, based on the Greek idea of poiesis, may be a way to call forth the sacred into the world.  In their vision, this mastery is the skilled knowledge and nurturing spirit to bring things out at their best, such as, for example, a master woodworker knowing just how to work with a given piece of wood.

These are all good arguments for why mastery matters.  And there’s no doubt that pursuing mastery in something can be a lot of fun, perhaps because pursuit itself is so fun.  But.  There are also beautiful opportunities for fun that lie outside the realm of anything that we can master.  They occupy the moments in our lives that are simply living, not expressing or striving.  There needs to be room for them too.

When Jamie put his feet into that cold, clear water, he was simply a child doing something lovely.  When I put my feet in the water, it was, perhaps, a de facto, if momentary, act of resistance.  I wasn’t working on my kayaking skills, or my tennis serve, or my martini mixing, or my writing, or my cooking, or anything else I do because it’s fun and I genuinely want to be better at it.  I wasn’t mastering anything, and I wasn’t improving myself.  In this one thing, Jamie and I were already perfect.