What Makes Us Happy?

Blog Music: Halelujah by Jeff Buckley (open is seperate window)

More Blog Music: Now We Are Free by Hans Zimmer and Lisa Gerrard (from the Gladiator Soundtrack)

I recently read an amazing article entitled What Makes Us Happy? by Joshua Wolf Shenk of The Atlantic. Don't let the title fool you... this article is far more earth-moving literature than Dr. Phil self-help.

 Shenk opens the article by explaining;

Last fall, I spent about a month in the file room of the Harvard Study of Adult Development, hoping to learn the secrets of the good life. The project is one of the longest-running—and probably the most exhaustive—longitudinal studies of mental and physical well-being in history. Begun in 1937 as a study of healthy, well-adjusted Harvard sophomores (all male), it has followed its subjects for more than 70 years.

The problems with the science of the study are glaring right from the start (all white harvard men who lived from the 1920s till today), but thankfully Shank never expects to find the answer to his own generalized question: What Makes Us Happy? Instead he uses the title as a subversive attention-getter to tell the gritty dramas of these well-documented lives (which include Bill Bradley, JFK, and other notable white guys).

Other than one or two obligatory paragraphs that describe the obvious (mostly physical) qualities that Harvard has determined as the keys to a well-lived life, Shank and the study itself float in the contradictions, the singularities, and the oddities of the men being studied, as well as the men doing the studying. Even the head Harvard scientist mixes his scientific method with a philosophical rhythm. He states of the men being studied, "Their lives were too human for science, too beautiful for numbers, too sad for diagnosis and too immortal for bound journals."

I highly recommend that you waste the next 15 minutes of your work day to delve into this fascinating scientific-character study. It started me thinking about my own life - and its lessons and unlessons have been resonating within me all day. Below you will find my twisted life analysis as inspired by the article...so continue reading if you dare (er...i mean care). However, if your attention span is as short as mine...then please just go over and read the real deal - What Makes Us Happy? by Joshua Shank.

Life as a Longitudinal Study.

Isn't every life lived, in fact, a longitudinal study with one subject and many observes? If you are reading this... please let me thank you for being an observer of my longitudinal blog/ study. In my very first blog post, I proclaimed the goal of my travel adventures would be to erase/finish/perfect/ erratic/ become/ forget the following thought;

I wait for a moment of brilliant, purifying redemption. I wait for a combination of words so lovely, so undeniably, eternally true that they will apologize to everyone I have ever known and make them understand why I never apologized before.

I wait for fleeting moments of innocence when I can smile and feel a rush of happiness without a hint of guilt.

I wait for a sign from a God, I really don't even believe to exist. At night, I talk to my phantom creator and potential savior, but mid-sentence I am silenced by the suspicion that I am either talking to myself, or God already knows I am insincere and has stopped listening. So I wait...

I wrote the above paragraph on the inside cover of my journal 3 years ago, and I identified strongly with its confessional truths until now. At the time, I was drowning in the thick, self-flagellation of depression. [I just deleted several sentences that described the lowliness of my depression. I feel that it is not beneficial or necessary to delve into those details any more. To say it was a painful and disturbing time is enough.]  The above journal entry feels like a relic of my decaying past. I once read it daily, marveling at how beautifully it captured some truth about life. Now, I read it and wince at its untruth, its passivity, and tone of hopelessness. Specifically, the phrase "I wait" strikes me as particularly untrue in this place, at this moment.

I am no longer waiting. 

I haven't been waiting since I made the decision to quit my job and runaway to Brazil. The phrase "I wait" is inherently passive....as was my life prior to the last 4 months. However, my time since leaving Barbour Publishing has been different - It has been lived deliberately. I was unhappy behind a desk so I quit. I decided to come to Brazil, and I came. I decided to appeal my final semester transcripts from Mount Union, and I did. I have decided to move to Portland when I return home, and I will.  It's not that I have found the (self-help nonsense or religious gibberish) Meaning of Life in my travels. It's that I am no longer waiting on a mystical answer at all.

 My friend (and future Portland roommate) Kevin is also no longer waiting. Kevin has taught high school english for the last two years, and for two years Kevin has been waiting to find satisfaction in his job. Well, as of last week, Kevin taught his last day at New Philadelphia High School...like I said he is done waiting. Before we adventure to Portland together, Kevin is spending "an amount of time" in Chicago with his brother - just as I did after quitting my job.  "I am calling it 'the pat gerber road to recovering your soul' trip", Kevin joked in an email to me.

Maturation makes liars of us all.

Indeed, "Recovering my Soul" is exactly what this experience in Brazil has done (is doing). Kevin and I are very much at the same transition of our lives. We are unapologetically looking for the ideal ways to live our lives - to be happy - to become the people we envision ourselves as. I used to call this my quarter life crisis, but now I can see that it is actually the process of entering adulthood.

If I am finally entering adulthood at 25, it means I have been a 20-something child for the past 5 years. I might feel ashamed of this delayed maturity if not for one of the conclusions drawn by the Harvard study that I found particularly fascinating. The evidence overwhelming acknowledges that the person you are at 20 is absolutely NOT an indicator of who you will be or how happy you will be at 50. Perhaps this seems obvious, but it so flies in the face of everything we are intentionally and unintentionally taught as students from kindergarden through college graduation that I felt chains fall off when I read it.

I can remember vividly this sense that my future (and even my identity) depended entirely on the next placement test, the next college admission essay, my final, my next step on the predetermined path to success.  And now at 25 years old, siting in an orphanage in Brazil, I realize it was all a lie...none of it ever mattered.  The Harvard scientist said it this way, "Maturation makes liars of us all". Meaning no matter your test scores or predicted future at 16, 20, or even 24, our adolescent attitudes will be proven false with the passage time. I feel like I am just beginning MY life, and (apparently) it's an okay time to start. How is it that I found peace and justification by comparing my life to the lives of Harvard graduates from the Greatest Generation?  

A Life Well Lived.

As Kevin and I embark on the adventure of adulthood, our transition is being beautiful mirrored by my parent’s transition into retirement. The same week that Kevin finished teaching at New Philadelphia, my mom taught her last day after 30 years as an Elementary Teacher. And in about a month, my dad will retire as a School Administrator (for the second time). The shocking thing about my parents' life transition and the my life transition is not the differences, but the shocking similarities. Kevin, Ted, Sue and I are all asking the same questions:

What now? What do I want to do? What will I enjoy doing? Where do I want to go? Who Do I want to go with? Have I lived a life well thus far? Can I live it better?

The answers are certainly not going to be found in this blog post or in any Harvard study. However, I can say with utter assurance (in my case) that LIFE MUST BE LIVED intentionally and delibertitly. “What we do,” the Harvard scientist also concludes, “affects how we feel just as much as how we feel affects what we do.”

There is another similarity in the overlapping transitions within my family.... I am now the age when parents first became parents and they are now grandparents (times 3).  Our relationship is evolving from the dependent/caretakers stage into the equals/friends stage. This is a wonderful season of life to just enjoy each other. These are the conversations and moments that are worth savoring...Worthy savoring because eventually our relationship will again evolve back into the dependent/caretaker stage - only this time I (and my sister) will have the hard job.

 Just last year, my father carried the burden of a dying parent. I watched him greive through the in-home care, the nursing home, the funeral home, and the in-home auction.  It was painful and inspiring to witness his dedication as a son to his mother. Only seeing it acted out first-hand was I able to grasp the reality of parents aging and dying. I don’t know if I am ready to carry that burden (or if I will ever be), but I pray I can be the son my father was to his mother when my mother needs me. Thankfully, according to our friends from Harvard, my parents meet all 7 of the major factors that predict healthy aging - education, stable marriage, not smoking, not abusing alcohol, some exercise, healthy weight, and mature adaptions. (I told you the actual scientific findings of the study were unexciting and obvious)  I guess this means my mom and dad will go on being Annoying Helpful and Loving well into their 100s. (and I guess I get to savor every annoying moment :)

 Mature Adaptations – Duh.

The only finding of the Harvard study that peeked my interest was the idea of Mature Adaptions. (This would be The Secret – if you were looking for one.) Shanks captures the idea of Mature Adaptaion like this;

The central question is not how much or how little trouble these men met, but rather precisely how—and to what effect—they responded to that trouble. His (the researcher’s) main interpretive lens has been the psychoanalytic metaphor of “adaptations,” or unconscious responses to pain, conflict, or uncertainty. Formalized by Anna Freud on the basis of her father’s work, adaptations (also called “defense mechanisms”) are unconscious thoughts and behaviors that you could say either shape or distort—depending on whether you approve or disapprove—a person’s reality.

I audibly giggled when I read this description because my father has worked my whole life to engrain one nugget of wisdom into my brain – “It is not what happens to you in life, It is how you react to it.”  Apperently, Ted’s hoksey Philopshy of Life has more truth to it than my teenage eye-rolls realized. And He didn’t even need the longest running longitudial Harvard study in the history of mental health to discover the Secret of Mature Adaptation – he just lived and loved.

Mature Adaptations may be obvious from the safe-distence of a Harvard study, but thier incrimental effects on lives is frighteningly-interesting. The power of Mature or Immature Adapations to alter, improve, predict, or destroy a life is sickening. The stories of men stuck in the mier of immature adaptation are painful to read - like watching a car crash in slow motion. You can see the destruction, the pain, and the saddness coming and all you can do is watch. However, men who lived “successful” lives are equally as frighteningly-interesting to ponder. Far from being lives of ease and leiser, the happiest men overcame and conquered like legandary heros of war (which some of them were).  Shank observes, “The most inspiring triumphs were often studies in hardship”.

The Nicest Natzi You’ll Ever Meet.

I recently had (what can only be described as) an encounter with a man who created triumphs from harships and adapted more than successfully to his life. This giant of a man is named Senhor Jack (I never got a last name). Senhor Jack is one of the orginal founders of CLM. After spending time with this aged and wise man, I felt like life was a true adventure – like the road to happiness had been laid out at my feet – like I had just conversed with the oldman version of myself from the future …There was a profound smirk in Senhor Jack’s eyes like he knows…stuff.

Senhor Jack and his granddaughter/nurse, Jessica, stayed with us on the farm for a week. Technically, I suppose this is actually Jack’s farm because he donated the land for CLM 30 years ago (and has been actively investing in CLM ever since). Jack is suffering from the late stages of Parkinson’s Disease, and I got the impression that this visit to CLM might be his good-bye visit.  Despite his shacking hands, his half flipped–up shirt colars, and his question mark-like posture, Jack sat at Vicky’s Kitchen table like a king…his steady and controlled presense filling the room.

Over tea and translations, I learned that Jack was an engineer and inventor in his youth. (anyone that can legitametely call themselves an inventor is automatically cool). He patented the first design for the spare tire holder that is still used today on he backs of Jeeps. In his words, “I just thought… ‘Isn’t this stupid I have crawl on the ground everytime I want to change the tire’. So fixed that problem.”

On our last afternoon together, I drove Jack and Jessica to Turvo. All three of us were squeezed into the front seat of Combi Van, and I was anxiously asking about and listening to Jack’s whimsically well-lived life. Jack was just wrapping a tri-fector of invention stories when he said “Really, I owe a lot of my mechanical skills to the war. I learned a lot working on the weapons, trucks, and tanks. My Dad fought for Germany too, in first world war, and he told me to become an engineer so I wouldn’t have to fight on the front lines.” I was still nodding like a star-struck teenager, as his words slowly hit me.

Senhor Jack was a Natzi.

He continued to describe the modifications he developed for various models of German tanks and planes, but I was no longer really listening. In stunned confusion, I stopped asking questions and silence fell over the car. I just staired out the front window of the van as scenes from Band of Brothers flipped through my mind. Occosianlly, I would peak at Jack from the corner of my right eye – just to make sure he wasn’t sporting a Hitler mustache. But there he was…this generious, gentle, wise old man. He and Jessica casually gazed out the windows as we passed the Guruapuava slums as if they had no understanding of the historical and cultural significance of Natzi Germany – especially to an American who’s Grandfather fought in WWII – They just smiled and we rolled along…

An American and two Germans driving on a dirt road next to a Brazilian shanty town talking about how Natzi Germany helped make this old man into a rich inventor, who gives his money to orphaned Brazillian kids that once lived in the wooden shacks of the shanty town….How the hell did I get here again?

Then, suddenly Jack broke the silence. He started pointing wildy out the window and gesturing for Jessica to fill me on on the excitement. She smiled warmly. “Grandpa just donated that building to a local church to be used as a daycare and after school center”, Jessica explained. “The pastor told Grandpa, ‘I have been dreaming of this center for 2 years now. We just need the land.’ Grandpa told the pastor, ‘I have your land. I have been dreaming of this for 30 years and waiting for you.’”

 What's The Meaning of Life?

I have learned…it is best not to ask. The file cabinates full of paper at Harvard no more reveal the answer than the profound smirk in Senhor Jack’s eyes.

Joshua Shank came to the following (nicely worded) non-conclusion in his article, which I will barrow for my non-conclusion;

Only with patience and tenderness might a person surrender his barbed armor for a softer shield. Perhaps in this, I thought, lies the key to the good life—not rules to follow, nor problems to avoid, but an engaged humility, an earnest acceptance of life’s pains and promises.

Grace&Peace. Gerbs.