Don't search...travel.

Patience can be a tough (read: near impossible) thing to master. Patience takes patience, I suppose.  In fact, I think the only way I'm able to be patient is to constantly remind myself to be so.  One of the ways I do this is by trying to trick myself.  What I've discovered is that either I'm very tricky or very gullible, because it seems to work!

I try to view all the things that I'm tempted to be impatient about as destinations that I can see, or at least places whose locations are known to me.  Rather than searching for love, or my purpose in life, or happiness, I'm traveling to these destinations.  This requires a certain measure of knowing yourself and being realistic, which will probably have to be another post all it's own.  Anyway, traveling is fun while searching can be frustrating.  Not knowing where something is makes you anxious, angry, and agitated.  On the other hand just going means, while it may not always be easy, you simply follow your compass.  If you let it be, it is quite freeing.

As for the more mundane needs for patience, i.e. for Christmas, for trips, for that shiny new pocket watch...I don't know if I really have any tricks yet.  I don't have too much trouble with those, aside from the odd up-swelling of excited anticipation.  Really it's just a matter of not fixating on such things so much, I think that's something one develops in time.  Some probably take a bit longer than others, and obviously I can't speak for all adults, but I know I'm much more patient in that regard than when I was nine.  Basically, you just need to chill out.  In any case, I'll think on that a bit.  Just be patient...

Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, "I hate quotations.  Tell me what you know."  Well I know that there have been and will be many a wiser man than I.  So here's a quote from one of them, "Yet the fisherman says, 'Patience.'  Patience dear God--send me an abundance of it!  Although there is no sign of it, the net should, at some time be full." -Abraham Kohn

Ultimately I think it all comes down to trust.  Whether it's in God, the universe, yourself, or something else entirely, find a thing in which to place your trust.  In the end patience is trust.  Thus without trust, you'll never enjoy the happiness that encompasses you now.  I guess that makes lesson 5: trust patience...or patiently trust...something like that.

How do you know?

...I think you just kind of guess.

I don't know if that's helpful, but for me it's quite freeing.   Recently it feels like I'm constantly making decisions that I'm not fully prepared to make.  That can be a rather unsettling feeling, but really it doesn't need to be.  I've come to the realization that, at least for myself, I've been making those guesses my entire life.  Many, perhaps even most, of my big life decisions have been guesses.  Educated guesses...hopefully.  Good guesses...sometimes.  Lucky guesses...probably too many.

I'm not too sure yet, but I think a lot of what this blog looks to explore is hidden in this thought.  Making peace with it, getting better at doing it, and most of all not stressing out over it.  While there are some decision points that are a little less rectifiable (largely the life and death sort), for the most part life is multiple choice.  As in, you get as many guesses as you choose to make.  If you guess incorrectly to start with, guess again.  I firmly know that torturing yourself over a bad guess doesn't improve anything.  I choose to see all of the stupid guesses I make as just part of the thought process for making an educated one*.  In fact, I'm one of the best educated people that I know!

I think the only truly wrong choices are the bad ones that you stick with.  The worst offence being to stop guessing all together.

So I guess what I'm trying to say is, once you realize that you made a bad guess, don't stress.  Just make another one.  Hell, make a whole bunch of guesses at once...maybe you'll save some time!  After all, even a blind pig catches a worm once in a while.

Now, for something completely different:

*This can take a lot of reminding yourself to think that way, also it tends to not work until you take a little time to distance yourself emotionally from the decision if it was particularly traumatising. 

Sit and Be

So there's a great book I've been reading recently called "An Optimist's Tour of the Future".  I highly recommend giving it a read.  It's funny, interesting, and it really does give one hope for the world we could have, despite the news reports failing to deliver in that same regard.  In essence it kind of encapsulates many of the finer points of happiness.  Furthermore, it probably played a  respectable role in my starting of this blog.

Anyway, I digress from my real point.  In the book the author recalls a story of a tour boat captain in New Zealand, Tim, who takes a German couple out for a dolphin spotting excursion.  After a few hours of fruitless searching, despite the German man's insistence that they find the elusive creatures, Tim drops anchor in a most tranquil and picturesque little spot.  The captain asks the man, "Do you want to continue looking?  Or would you rather just sit and be?"

Tim recounts, "The funniest thing happened, he looked at me as if I'd suggested the most radical thing ever. 'Sit and be!  he said.  'Sit and be!'--as if it was the first time the idea had ever occurred to him.  He called to his wife.  'Write this down!' he told her.  'Sit and be!' 'Do you want to keep looking for dolphins?' I asked, and he said, 'No!  I want to sit and be!' so that's what we did."

It's pretty clear to me that a lot more of us need to realize that that's an option.  Give yourself some time to plop down and just use your brain...or not use it...or kind of both simultaneously.  You might be thinking that you usually do that anyway, but I think we both know that that isn't what I mean.

Set aside some time each week to erase the constant droning of life from your ears.  Grab a book, or some jazz, a cup of tea...just sit and be.

You don't have to necessarily be sitting, the other day I raced a bus up Queen Anne Ave.  I was on a run, and I had just started up the hill when a bus passed me by and subsequently stopped.  I pushed on past it, and then it started up again.  It was struggling with the hill as well, so I decided to try to keep pace with it.  Passing me again, I pressed on harder and was able to catch up on it's stops.  When we finally reached the top of the hill, we had more or less tied (a little less), but you can be sure that any concerns I had had were fully squeezed out of my mind.

I guess the point is have fun with the world.  Play, think, do nothing!  John Cleese did a really great lecture about being creative, and I think it really can apply to finding a happy state as well.

So again, this week's lesson: go somewhere pleasant...sit...and be.

Lesson Deux

Don't rely on others to make you happy, 
rely on making others happy to make you happy.

It's hard not to be selfish...perhaps altogether impossible.  We're taught from a young age that being selfish is such a terrible, distasteful thing.  Every time I sit and think on the topic however; I can only ever come up with the grey-est, half-examples of truly selfless acts.  So if one accepts that we're all selfish, and that it isn't intrinsically a bad thing, then when is being selfish bad?

I guess my answer for that is: when you're an ass.  That was already pretty well established, so now where does this tie in with happiness?  Well it's hard to prove, but I find it exceedingly hard to believe that anyone has ever extracted real joy out of another's pain.  Catharsis, exhilaration, or some other "good" feeling, perhaps.  Yet I don't think any of those are sustainable, nor can they build a background state of happiness.

It's like all the "good" feelings in life are vehicles, and they run on different fuels.  They all have different efficiencies, different handling characteristics, safety ratings, etc.  Money, for example, has the ability to bring joy.  But since money is it's own capital for the joy it offers, it cultivates greed.  For those that use money and it's pursuit as their main source of bliss, there is a built in resistance to sharing it because it's depleting your reserves.  If the money ever runs out, so do your smiles.  For those who don't focus on the money itself, it still tends to be more a point stress than anything if it's given too high of a station.
*Note: this is not meant to be a condemnation of money or those who have it.  Just a commentary  on how it can be overvalued. I like having money too!

Happiness is the solar powered car of the group.  Though instead of light, it runs on happiness, and the only way it can get it's fuel is if it collects it off of others.  If it ends there though, the world quickly runs out of happiness.  Thus one needs to re-emit the happiness back out into the world.  Therefore the more you shine outward, the more you take in.  It almost seems to defy the laws of physics!  It's like once you reach a certain level of energy you fire these lasers out, and when people get hit their levels get pumped up enough to power their lasers etc.  Also, if you think of happiness as a wave, you can see how it would be amplified by combining multiple iterations of itself...kind of like a rouge wave of awesome.

Sorry I kind of geeked out there for a second.

Now it is difficult to be so selflessly selfish.  The easy logic doesn't track that giving is receiving.  So keeping the idea on the tip of your brain, that making every single person that you come into contact with just a little bit happier will make you exponentially happier, is the initial task you need to work on.

I'm sure that some people reading this would conclude that it's a bunch of hippie, love-everyone drivel.  To those people I would say nothing.  To people that know those people, I would say make them happier!  Also I just want put it out there that I do not pretend to be one who's mastered any of this, I'm just someone looking for the answers.

So I guess my second lesson, and perhaps the most important I will stumble across in my (probably banal) musings, is be selfish!

Also watching this always makes me happy:

On Being Happy: Lesson 1

Go to Oregon...

Or go anywhere really.  

"Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do.  So throw off the bowlines.  Sail away from the safe harbor.  Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore.  Dream.  Discover."

                 -Mark Twain

Complacency is easy.  It's odd cause being uncomplacent...incomplacent...being the opposite of complacent is easy too, and it is far, far superior.  

So for this first of my lessons for the world on how to be happy, I propose you do something original (for you, at least).  Go somewhere new, do something different, break up your routine!  This may not be an original thought, it may be rather obvious to many.  Yet for too many (myself included) it's a thought that is not exercised frequently enough.

Thusly, my challenge to all that read this is to fit in some small novelty at least once weekly.  You don't necessarily need to leave the state, though I find it can definitely help!

Bonne chance!

Visiting Short Sands Beach in Oswald State Park, OR was wonderful, and I highly recommend it!