"I dreamed that life was happiness. When I awoke, I found that life was service. When I served, I found that service was happiness." (from a homily, taken from an Indian poet (Tagore?)
"Mr. Shaw, are you happy?" "Happy? Happiness, madame, is for pigs." (Conversation attributed to GB Shaw)
Yes, I realize that this topic is too big for a brief blog, but let's give it a try. It is so big because happiness is an individual affair, or so it seems. It is also elusive. What makes us happy one moment, or one year, or several, will not work for us later on. Finding happiness for an hour is easy; for a day is harder; for a year, almost impossible.
For instance, I have dreams which continually put me back at the co-ops of Ann Arbor, where I was a graduate student. There was a lot of work and anxiety back then, but I have long looked at this period as the happiest time of my life. It is because I was young, and more importantly, had found my niche. I thought I had found what I would do for the rest of my life, and it would provide me with everything I then thought important: prestige, summers off, research, travel, and adventure. This did not work out, but I have long tried to decipher the meaning of this repetition. Am I constantly going back in my mind as a reminder of a life unfulfilled? Is it the anxiety of making it in a tough department, a sort of PTS disorder that keeps me going back? Because I often get the feeling of suffocation, is it because of sleep apnea, and a paring of this time, somehow, with oppression?
Perhaps all of the above, but this morning I awoke thinking it had to do with happiness; for in my dreams back at the co-ops, besides always being late for a class, there are often interesting romantic possibilities and beer parties. I love beer, and who doesn't love a romance? And so, happiness; but why the repetition? It occurs to me that it means this type of happiness is, in the end, for pigs. I am too old for beer parties and youthful romance. This morning, I felt as if the message was saying, "grow up! Get over it!"
It is over, and in any case, this period of my life was certainly not complete happiness, and certainly was not "forever," and would never have been, regardless.
In recent years, I have simply not looked for happiness - as I had not, in many ways, in pursuing my career. It comes and goes, and, except in very low times, it does not matter. I live, I do what I have to and a little of what I want to, and things work out OK. But service? If happiness of the sort I dream of is for pigs, could the happiness of a life-time, a mature and long-standing kind, be found in service?
I don't know. I volunteer now and then for small-town charities and so on, and it is always worth it. But happiness? It seems to me that too much service would become a burden. Mother Theresa, the poster woman of service, suffered horribly in the slums of Calcutta. The people she served were often not the doe-eyed grateful poor that the media loves to display when it virtually markets refugees and immigrants and the poor in general. In reality, in Calcutta they stole, they raped the younger nuns, they threatened and hurt, and even killed, those others who were weaker than they. They were, in effect, all - too - human. Mother Theresa told of this, and it has been written - I do not know if it is true - that she had to undergo more than one exorcism, for all the evil she was exposed to. She went on anyway, to reveal what she believed was the Face of Christ in every human.
I do not believe that she EVER thought that her service would bring her happiness. She did it for her belief, which she admitted wavered at times. Think of the hell that must have been. In the end, did she review her life and find that it possessed a deeper happiness? I don't know. But, in retrospect, it certainly wouldn't have brought self-chastisement, at least the service part (she probably never thought she did enough, and in that would have found fault. Imagine.) By contrast, in the end, the self-satisfied professor, the confident millionaire, the famous and wealthy of all types must certainly feel dissatisfaction at their lack of genuine service, the kind that doesn't buttress the ego, for in the end we all witness the dissolution of everything the ego once felt important. Wealth, sexual conquests, parties, all those good times must seem, in the face of the infinite, to be the toys of a child, with most of the time spent on them a waste.
Yes, then, that's it - the past in my dreams is a reference to small things, to things I must get past. But service, real service, is such a big thing. It is not about us or our happiness. How strange, and yet probably true, that in not looking for happiness at all, but for someone else's well-being, we might find the one enduring kind of happiness that does not look like happiness at all, until we are finally able to see just where it is we are, and what we have really lived. FK
"Mr. Shaw, are you happy?" "Happy? Happiness, madame, is for pigs." (Conversation attributed to GB Shaw)
Yes, I realize that this topic is too big for a brief blog, but let's give it a try. It is so big because happiness is an individual affair, or so it seems. It is also elusive. What makes us happy one moment, or one year, or several, will not work for us later on. Finding happiness for an hour is easy; for a day is harder; for a year, almost impossible.
For instance, I have dreams which continually put me back at the co-ops of Ann Arbor, where I was a graduate student. There was a lot of work and anxiety back then, but I have long looked at this period as the happiest time of my life. It is because I was young, and more importantly, had found my niche. I thought I had found what I would do for the rest of my life, and it would provide me with everything I then thought important: prestige, summers off, research, travel, and adventure. This did not work out, but I have long tried to decipher the meaning of this repetition. Am I constantly going back in my mind as a reminder of a life unfulfilled? Is it the anxiety of making it in a tough department, a sort of PTS disorder that keeps me going back? Because I often get the feeling of suffocation, is it because of sleep apnea, and a paring of this time, somehow, with oppression?
Perhaps all of the above, but this morning I awoke thinking it had to do with happiness; for in my dreams back at the co-ops, besides always being late for a class, there are often interesting romantic possibilities and beer parties. I love beer, and who doesn't love a romance? And so, happiness; but why the repetition? It occurs to me that it means this type of happiness is, in the end, for pigs. I am too old for beer parties and youthful romance. This morning, I felt as if the message was saying, "grow up! Get over it!"
It is over, and in any case, this period of my life was certainly not complete happiness, and certainly was not "forever," and would never have been, regardless.
In recent years, I have simply not looked for happiness - as I had not, in many ways, in pursuing my career. It comes and goes, and, except in very low times, it does not matter. I live, I do what I have to and a little of what I want to, and things work out OK. But service? If happiness of the sort I dream of is for pigs, could the happiness of a life-time, a mature and long-standing kind, be found in service?
I don't know. I volunteer now and then for small-town charities and so on, and it is always worth it. But happiness? It seems to me that too much service would become a burden. Mother Theresa, the poster woman of service, suffered horribly in the slums of Calcutta. The people she served were often not the doe-eyed grateful poor that the media loves to display when it virtually markets refugees and immigrants and the poor in general. In reality, in Calcutta they stole, they raped the younger nuns, they threatened and hurt, and even killed, those others who were weaker than they. They were, in effect, all - too - human. Mother Theresa told of this, and it has been written - I do not know if it is true - that she had to undergo more than one exorcism, for all the evil she was exposed to. She went on anyway, to reveal what she believed was the Face of Christ in every human.
I do not believe that she EVER thought that her service would bring her happiness. She did it for her belief, which she admitted wavered at times. Think of the hell that must have been. In the end, did she review her life and find that it possessed a deeper happiness? I don't know. But, in retrospect, it certainly wouldn't have brought self-chastisement, at least the service part (she probably never thought she did enough, and in that would have found fault. Imagine.) By contrast, in the end, the self-satisfied professor, the confident millionaire, the famous and wealthy of all types must certainly feel dissatisfaction at their lack of genuine service, the kind that doesn't buttress the ego, for in the end we all witness the dissolution of everything the ego once felt important. Wealth, sexual conquests, parties, all those good times must seem, in the face of the infinite, to be the toys of a child, with most of the time spent on them a waste.
Yes, then, that's it - the past in my dreams is a reference to small things, to things I must get past. But service, real service, is such a big thing. It is not about us or our happiness. How strange, and yet probably true, that in not looking for happiness at all, but for someone else's well-being, we might find the one enduring kind of happiness that does not look like happiness at all, until we are finally able to see just where it is we are, and what we have really lived. FK
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