Go out for a walk.
“Go out for a walk. It doesn’t have to be a romantic walk in
the park… It doesn’t have to be a walk during which you’ll have multiple life
epiphanies and discover meanings no other brain ever managed to encounter. Do
not be afraid of spending quality time by yourself… That doesn’t make you
antisocial or cause you to reject the rest of the world. But you need to
breathe. And you need to be.” Albert
Camus
Find your happiness
Star conductor Eschenbach shares secrets
to happiness
In war-struck Germany, it was music that
gave the child Christoph Eschenbach a fresh start in life. Turning 75 on
February 20, the world-renowned conductor says music keeps him from aging.
Christoph Eschenbach is in the news
again. He will soon be receiving the Ernst von Siemens music award for his
life's work, one year after receiving a Grammy. He is the music director of the
National Symphony Orchestra in Washington, DC. And now on February 20 he is
celebrating a milestone birthday: 75.
Eschenbach has already found the key to
success and happiness: continually searching for new experiences and filling
every day with music, he tells DW.
"Every day is the day. Routine is a
horrible word. It shouldn't exist for anyone. I preach that practically like a
priest," explained the conductor. And this life approach seems to be
working for Eschenbach. He is in great health and high spirits.
Although Eschenbach is currently one of
the world's most famous living conductors, he stays modest and down-to-earth.
He doesn't think about his fame, he says. He just keeps working and follows the
motto: He who searches, will find.
"And I always find," sums up
Eschenbach.
But it is not beauty that he is looking
for. "Music goes way beyond beauty. There is also the opposite of beauty:
aggression. [Igor Stravinsky's] 'Sacre du Printemps' is not about beauty. It's
about nature's strength and also violence. And music incorporates all these
things."
Eschenbach doesn't think much about age,
but just carries on doing what he loves: making music and inspiring people.
"Every step is an important step, as long as it's a step forward, and as
long as it's to discover new worlds. And I'm very lucky that I'm able to always
discover new worlds and don't stagnate. I can't imagine one day having to stop
making music and stop stimulating music in others."
'Home is in me'
Eschenbach says he loves many things
about Washington, DC - the size of the city, the cherry blossoms in the spring,
its cosmopolitan nature. "It's the capital, but it's not boastful,"
he says.
However, he doesn't feel bound to one
place or one nationality. Though he was born in Germany, he has lived in many
different European and American cities over the course of his career, holding
positions at the Tonhalle Orchestra Zurich, the Houston Symphony Orchestra, the
NDR Symphony Orchestra in Hamburg, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Orchestra de
Paris, and the Philadelphia Orchestra.
"I often get asked where home
is," says Eschenbach. "But home is in me, in my soul."
As the music director of the National
Symphony Orchestra since 2010, Eschenbach has brought fresh energy and a
European touch to the US capital's musical landscape. And the city loves him
back.
With his small frame and friendly brown
eyes, he is rather mellow and unobtrusive off-stage. But once he takes up the
baton, his passion and enthusiasm emerge.
"He gets into the music very much
and sometimes we fear that he'll actually fall off the back of the
podium," laughs Robert Oppelt, principal bassist with the National
Symphony Orchestra. "Christoph, more than most conductors, gives his heart
and soul to the music. It's never ever superficial, but dedicated and sincere."
'The stage is my world'
He who searches, will find, says
Eschenbach
Eschenbach has the orchestra under
control. During slower moments, he conducts solely with his eyebrows or with a
nod, but when the music swells he jumps in the air and uses his whole body for
expression.
"I save up my energy for the stage;
one can't be dramatic all the time," laughs Eschenbach. "The stage is
my world. This is where I pull musicians into my field of interpretation. It
has to burn in me and in them. And it does."
Eschenbach and the National Symphony
Orchestra have a relationship of mutual appreciation. After rehearsals, the
maestro likes to check in with the musicians. "There's never any
hesitation to go up to him and ask something about the music, find out what's
going on in his life and vice versa," says Oppelt.
The members of the orchestra appreciate
Eschenbach's friendliness, passion and attention to detail. "His music is
so flexible and expressive," says assistant principal hornist Laurel
Bennert Ohlson. "Every time going through a piece is a little bit
different, so we have to be on our toes, wide awake, and be ready for little
nuances."
Music as a life saver
Music saved Eschenbach as a child in
Breslau (now Wroclaw in Poland). When World War II made him an orphan - his
mother died in childbirth and his father, who opposed the Nazis, was sent off
in a punishment battalion, he stopped speaking for a year.
"I was consumed by horrific images
that sealed my mouth shut," he recalls. His stepmother sang and played
instruments. "I immediately recognized music as the means of expression
that I needed. I plunged into it, and I was suddenly happy, I could breathe
again and I could talk again. The world looked completely different."
Eschenbach was six years old at the
time. "That's what music should do. Without the barrier of letters, it
should speak and fulfil all people. That phenomenon is new again every day, and
that's why one doesn't actually age."
The Happiness Factor
Can
Money Buy Us Happiness?
In some cases, what you pay for
may cheer you up.
These purchases may give you a
boost; but how long will it last?
By Geoff Williams
Money can't buy you happiness,
goes the generally accepted wisdom that was probably made up by someone poor,
who wanted to bring his rich friends down a few notches. Some scientific
studies have agreed with that sentiment, while others have concluded that, yes,
being rich helps with being happy. In any case, if you want to crack open your
wallet and try to buy some happiness, there are some purchases that may lift
your spirits (at least for a while).
Buy experiences, not things.
Several studies in recent years, including a report published last year in the
journal Psychological Science, have shown that buying experiences – like going
on a skiing trip or taking an art class – makes us happier than material goods.
Part of that is due to the anticipation of an experience, the study suggests,
which is apparently more exciting than when you're waiting to buy merchandise
like laptops and clothes.
Another reason paying for experiences
can make us happier is that their value endures over time. That seems
ridiculous at first. After all, if you buy new stuff, like a lamp, you might
have that stuff until you die. If you go on a weekend trip with the family,
it's over come Sunday. Arguably, that's why many people choose to buy things
over spending money on doing something fun.
Still, unlike buying new
clothes or a new electronic gadget, "We can savor the memories of a
vacation for a lifetime," says James Roberts, a professor of marketing at
Baylor University in Waco, Texas, and author of "Shiny Objects: Why We
Spend Money We Don't Have in Search of Happiness We Can't Buy."
"The thrill from material
purchases is usually short-lived," Roberts adds, explaining that this is
especially true when monthly bills for the purchase keep coming. "Often,
the boost we get from spending on ourselves quickly disappears."
Some brand names may make you
(briefly) happier. There are always exceptions to these rules, and Kordell
Norton, a business consultant and speaker in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, thinks he’s
found one. Some business have a knack for making customers so happy that the
mere act of interacting and buying from the company feels like a pleasant
experience versus a mere transaction, says Norton, whose book, “Business
Charisma: How Great Organizations Engage and Win Customers Again and Again,” is
soon to be released. Think companies like Disney, Apple, Trader Joe's and
Harley Davidson, he says.
"Harley-Davidson may have
one of the lowest quality scores in their industry," Norton says,
"but they rank highest in customer loyalty."
And Starbucks? "They build
a personal relationship with the customer, the moment the individual customer's
name goes on the cup," he says.
This is great for the company,
and something cost-conscious consumers should be aware of when shopping from
those brands they feel most loyal to. Is this fleeting moment of happiness you
experience worth the money? If the shopping experience really makes you happy,
maybe so. But if your constant purchases from the brand are the reason you're
always short on cash, perhaps you should seek happiness elsewhere.
But for the most part, the
happiness people get from spending money on most products doesn't last long,
according to Norton. "Quickly those things we purchase, our trophies,
gather dust like so many plaques and awards on some shelf," he says.
Buy something for someone else
and not yourself. Sounds suspiciously like talk from the head of a charitable
organization, but numerous studies have shown that if you really want to be
happy, you’d do well to spend your money on other people – not yourself. In
fact, a high-profile series of studies published in a 2008 issue of Science
concluded that even spending $5 a day on someone else, whether a charity or
needy stranger, can boost an individual's happiness.
"Using our strengths for a
cause larger than ourselves is the real secret to a meaningful life,"
Roberts says.
Milestone purchases. If you
make an impulse buy or tend to habitually buy the latest, greatest items, such
as the new-model tablet, your happiness is probably going to dissolve quickly.
But that widescreen TV you've always dreamed of having? Or the living room
furniture you've been coveting for years? That probably will make you pretty
happy, according to Allen Wagner, a marriage and family therapist in Los
Angeles.
From what he has seen, some
types of purchases have made his patients happy, particularly those that
symbolize an individual or family reaching a new level in their lifestyle.
"When people work really
hard, we typically need a carrot to give us that strength and push us over the
hump," Wagner says.
He says for some people, that
will be a new car, or maybe a new swimming pool or expensive clothes.
"Typically, it's not a
name brand that will lead to happiness. It's a person's ability to make their
lifestyle what they always fantasized and imagined it to be," Wagner says.
Joe Luciani, a New York City
psychologist who writes self-coaching books, agrees, at least when it comes to
the new car purchase. "I've worked with numerous patients throughout the
years who were able to find significant happiness and serenity from buying the
car of their dreams," he says. "When depressed, anxious, physically
limited, or otherwise feeling powerless, that new car seems to offer immediate
compensation in the form of refuge, mobility, responsiveness, escape and a
sense of total control."
Still, common sense would
dictate that if you're going to splurge, be certain that you can afford the car
of your dreams – otherwise, those monthly payments might turn into a nightmare.
That's when you'll realize that you aren’t actually living the new lifestyle
you've been working so hard to hit. You're just paying for a new lifestyle you
can't afford.
The
Spiritual Edge: The key to happiness? It's in the science
By Liz Mak
U.C. Berkeley is known for its
world-class scientists, in disciplines like physics, chemistry or biology. But
just a few blocks away from campus, you’ll find the school’s Greater Good
Science Center, where one scientist focuses on something different - the
science of Happiness.
Emiliana Simon-Thomas has a PhD
in Cognition, Brain and Behavior. She’s also the science director of the
Greater Good Science Center at U.C. Berkeley. Ask her for a definition of the
term, and Simon-Thomas says defining “happiness” isn’t so clear-cut.
“Happiness has to do with
having an easy time of feeling positive emotions,” she says, “being quick at
recovering from negative emotions -- although you do experience them -- and
having a sense of meaning and purpose that is tied to the collective. ‘I’m
contributing in a meaningful way to the people around me.’”
I visited Simon-Thomas at her
office in Berkeley. On her desk she’s placed a mug where she keeps her pens,
with a graphic displaying the “six habits of happiness worth cultivating.” They
include dropping grudges, giving thanks and practicing kindness.
The diagram makes the argument
that the pursuit of happiness is multi-layered. And that’s what the “Science of
Happiness” course teaches, too.
The course draws from
scientific studies focusing on the different components of happiness, from
social connection to compassion to gratitude and cooperation. But Simon-Thomas
says the point of the class isn’t just to teach students how these relate
theoretically to happiness. It’s also meant to give students the tools to live
the best lives they can.
“To really find their groove,”
she says. “To discover how to be who they want to be in the world.”
The world where Simon-Thomas
engages with her students is purely virtual.
This is an online self-paced classroom, with discussion boards and video
lectures ... and more than 150,000 students, from all around the world.
One of those first lessons
teaches that finding happiness can be an uncomfortable process. For example:
The fourth week’s assignment directs students to find someone they think has
wronged them, and then learn to forgive that person in just eight steps.
Simon-Thomas says there’s
scientific evidence that proves forgiveness is an important element of
happiness. Scientists used to believe that primates engaged in conflict would
run away from each other and remain apart.
Simon-Thomas says the thinking
was that the primates would make the connection: “‘That’s a hostile person and
I’m not going to come near them again.’”
But the reality is different.
“[The primates] don’t do that. A lot of the time they come back to one another
and reconcile.”
Simon-Thomas says as humans, we
are inclined to make peace, too. “I often return to these primate studies,” she
says, “because we want to convince people that this isn’t something we have to
learn from our culture … it’s our biological endowment for cooperation, reconciliation.”
An exercise in forgiveness
In taking the course, I found
myself calling up an ex-boyfriend, Albert, as part of an exercise instructing
students on how to forgive.
At the time, it had been
several weeks since Albert moved to New York and we broke up. During the end of
our relationship, his attention was elsewhere -- both professionally, and
personally. And for that last part of our relationship, I felt unimportant to
him, like I was always waiting for him to notice I was there.
Since then, I truly believed
I’d forgiven him -- and yet I still found myself getting angry with him in
conversations. So I placed the call: We chatted for an hour. It was the same
conversation we’d had before, and the entire time, I kept thinking back to a
certain part of the exercise, directing students to see if the conversation
inspired more compassion towards the person. But I didn't feel anything.
And then Albert said something
that moved me: “I think it’s been rare that you’ve believed that I was trying,”
he said, “even though I felt like I was trying pretty hard. It would’ve been
nice, you know, to feel like my efforts meant something."
It made me realize that
Albert’s been great about acknowledging my efforts -- I had to make more of an
effort to acknowledge his, too.
Positive psychology
The exercise marked the first
time I truly understood where Albert was coming from -- that any perceived
neglect wasn’t about a lack of caring for me. The assignment really did help me
forgive in a way I couldn’t before.
Simon-Thomas had pointed out that even primates have evolved
to do this. But to find out why this process of forgiveness is linked to
happiness, I turned to Dr. Fred Luskin, who works at Stanford and is an
authority on positive psychology. Luskin says, after forgiving someone, “you
don’t feel this need to complain about your life.”
“When you have a grudge or
you’re wounded, this urge to tell people and to blame stuff on it, and to just
feel like life has done you a bad turn -- it disappears,” Luskin says. “And you
find that you want to talk more about what’s good.”
According to the course,
appreciating the good is a fundamental element of happiness. Yet Luskin says in
the past, psychology used to focus on something counter to that knowledge: the
things that are wrong with people.
Luskin says it was only
relatively recently that psychologists began to research and teach positive
traits like hope, compassion and forgiveness. He says these are qualities that
people used to associate mainly with religion and spirituality -- but now,
we’re studying them as part of science, too.
“What may have been owned by
religious traditions such as forgiveness, being kind, being generous, being
grateful -- those are also secular qualities,” he says. “But they were kept
away from mainstream science because religion owned them. And now they’re being
blended.”
This blending is what the
Greater Good Science Center is doing with its Science of Happiness course:
giving people tools that they can use regardless of whether or not they hold
religious beliefs.
One of my fellow students, Anne
Hardy, says one of her tools is a newfound sense of empowerment. For her,
having a list of steps and assignments made it easier to make changes in her
life. When it comes to exercises like my
forgiveness exercise, she said, “finding some steps for what to follow, it
gives you courage.”
“You don’t think about the fear
that you have. Because it’s like, I’ll do that and do that and do that and it’s
going to work.”
Research
Proves That Money Can’t Buy Happiness
By LINDA & CHARLIE BLOOM
A recent study conducted by two
Emory University economics professors provides more evidence, documented by
formal research, that money can’t buy happiness, or to be more precise, that
spending a lot of money on a lavish wedding doesn’t make a couple’s future
prospects for happiness any more likely than spending less. In fact, according
the findings of Professors Hugo Mialon and Andrew Francis, a couple that spends
over $20,000 on their wedding is significantly less likely to have a happy
future together than a couple who spends between $5000-$10,000 on their big
day. What they found in their study of over 3000 individuals was that those
couples that opted for the higher-cost weddings were 1.6 times more likely to
divorce then those who paid under $10,000 for their weddings.
According to Mialon and
Francis, theirs is the first academic study to examine the correlation between
wedding expenses and the length of marriages. The wedding website TheKnot.com,
stated that a recent survey of 13,000 couples in the United States revealed
that the average amount spent per wedding in 2013 was $29,858. Nearly 15% of
couples spent more than $40,000 on their wedding and related events, not
including the honeymoon. Other big-ticket items that contribute to the expense
include engagement rings (at an average of $5,598), reception bands ($3,469),
flowers and other decor ($2,069) and wedding photos ($2,440).
In offering an explanation for
so many couples’ willingness to spend so much on weddings, Professor Francis
stated, “The wedding industry has long associated lavish weddings with
longer-lasting marriages. Industry advertising has fueled norms that create the
impression that spending large amounts on the wedding is a signal of commitment
or is necessary for a marriage to be successful.” He went on to claim that
their findings “provide little evidence to support the validity of the wedding
industry’s general message that connects expensive weddings with positive
marital outcomes”.
The study did however, find a
correlation between the number of people who attended the wedding and the
divorce rate which indicated that the greater the number of attendees, the
lower the rate of divorce.
Lest readers be too hasty to
conclude that the way to divorce-proof your marriage is to spend as little as
possible on your wedding and to invite as many people as possible to it, two
seemingly contradictory suggestions, let us remind you that there are other
ways to minimize the possibility of divorce and maximize the likelihood of a
happy marriage. That, however, is a subject too extensive to justice to in one
blog or newsletter. Check out our archives to find some useful ideas
(bloomwork.com).
Here’s the abbreviated answer
to the question of how that goal can be attained more effectively:
Start with the end that you
have in mind and begin by focusing on the kind of marriage that you want your
wedding to lead up to.
See if you can identify the
kinds of qualities that you will want to strengthen and develop in yourself in
order to be able to bring about the outcome that you desire. Give some thought
to the kind of behaviors and practices that will support the development of
these qualities.
For example, if generosity is
something that you think would be something that you think would be nice to
have more of in your relationship, you might want to look for opportunities to
be more giving in your life. Don’t limit your gifts to material items, but be
more willing to give your time, and attention to your partner in an effort to
make his or her life easier, more enjoyable, or more fulfilling.
If you’d like to have a high
level of trust in your relationship, look for opportunities to make yourself
more trustworthy by holding a higher standard to respectfulness and integrity.
If you really value honesty,
make a decision to be truthful and raise your standard of truthfulness in your
life to a higher level. If you want to have the most trusting marriage you can
have, become the most trustworthy person that you can be.
Keep all of your agreements.
Don’t make excuses to justify any lapses that occur and accept responsibility
for your actions. If you think that your relationships can’t possibly be any
better than it currently is, check in with your partner to see what he or she
thinks either or both of you could do that could might further enhance the
quality of your partnership.
Many couples make the decision
to marry while they are still in the throes of infatuation, which can be a time
in which it seems literally inconceivable that either one of us could ever feel
anything but love and adoration to the other. In the long run, this turns out
to be rarely the case, very rarely.
If you think that the idea of
embodying practices that will make you a better, more loving, and trustworthy
person, is easier said than done, you’re probably right. But putting your
attention on becoming the person of your dreams rather than hoping that a financial
investment in your wedding will produce the real payoff that you desire is far
more likely to bring about your desired outcome.
The Emory University study
didn’t offer any definitive reasons as to exactly why well-attended weddings
correlated to fewer divorces, or why more expensive weddings did not correlate
with more successful marriages. They simply noted the outcomes without
asserting any definitive causality. Feel free to draw your own conclusions.
We’re in the relationship-enhancement business, not the wedding business and we
don’t see them as being mutually exclusive. But as the saying goes, the most
important factor in determining what develops in your life has more to do with
what you most value and where you put your attention and energies. Weddings are
a one-day event. Marriage is a life-long process. Hopefully.
Should
Happiness Really Be the Goal?
By Therese Borchard
According to renowned
psychiatrist Peter Kramer, happiness isn’t the opposite of depression.
Resilience is.
I’ve always loved that reminder
because the word “happiness” makes me uneasy.
It’s not that I want to be
unhappy, or I don’t want to be happy. It’s that every time I make happiness my
goal, I become very unhappy. Like that famous study about suppressing thoughts
of white polar bears. When everyone was instructed to think about anything but
a white polar bear, they all thought about a white polar bear.
To be completely honest, I even
hate the “life is good” T-shirts.
I prefer the “life is crap”
ones, such as the one with the cruise ship about to plow over the guy in the
canoe. Whenever my husband wears that one, it puts me in a good mood.
I smiled at the discussion on
my online depression community, Project Beyond Blue, called “The Pursuit of
Happiness.” Maggie, a young mother of five kids and one of the group’s
administrators, had just read Eat, Pray, Love — about author Elizabeth
Gilbert’s quest to “leave behind all the trappings of modern American success
(marriage, house in the country, career) and find, instead, what she truly
wanted from life” (the Amazon description). Maggie was a tad frustrated by the
entire concept. She wrote:
“It’s probably because I’m a
cradle Catholic, but I found this whole journey of hers to be innately selfish
and egocentric. I mean, we’re all human. Who wouldn’t be happy with no money
worries for a year, doing whatever you wanted, with whomever you wanted,
wherever you wanted? I think even a week of this lifestyle would be enough to
make me feel ‘happy.’ But this year-long journey of self-discovery is totally
unrealistic to me. It’s like looking at someone’s Facebook page that just loves
to put up pictures of their latest vacations, or their brand new, custom-built
home. Yes, there is some envy mixed in there. I fully admit that. But my fear
is that too many people these days are buying into this whole notion of ‘do
whatever makes you happy.’ ”
I laughed out loud at that
because I remember exactly where I was when I picked up Eat, Pray, Love the
first time. I had snuck out of my inpatient program at Johns Hopkins Hospital.
That’s right, I broke out of the psychiatric ward to meet my husband and spend
an afternoon with him. Just him. No kids. We hadn’t spent a few hours alone
with each other in months, maybe years. So we strolled around the inner harbor
of Baltimore and ambled to the Barnes & Noble right there, in front of the
paddleboats.
I picked up the book because I
had heard about it. However, as soon as I read the back cover, I got queasy,
and quickly put it back down. I remember thinking to myself, “I am about as far
away from her notion of happiness as Dr. Joel Fuhrman’s green diet is to fried
Oreos.” It all seemed so unrealistic and, like Maggie said, self-absorbed. Who
wouldn’t want a life without commitments? Who wouldn’t want a week of
Saturdays? And even if I could pull it off — a life without commitments, a life
of Saturdays — is that really what I should strive for? Where would the world
be today if everyone strived for a life of Saturdays? Would we have benefited
from the contributions of extraordinary people like Mohandas Gandhi, Nelson
Mandela, and Mother Teresa? Their lives included lots and lots of Mondays,
weeks full of just stressful, painful Monday mornings.
Happiness expert Gretchen Rubin
tackles this indictment in her blog post, “Happiness Myth No. 10: The Biggest
Myth — It’s Selfish and Self-Centered to Try to Be Happier.“ She writes:
“Myth No. 10 is the most
pernicious myth about happiness. It comes in a few varieties. One holds that
‘In a world so full of suffering, you can be happy only if you’re callous and
self-centered.’ Another one is ‘Happy people become wrapped up in their own
pleasure; they’re complacent and uninterested in the world.’
Wrong. Studies show that, quite
to the contrary, happier people are more likely to help other people, they’re
more interested in social problems, they do more volunteer work, and they
contribute more to charity. They’re less preoccupied with their personal problems.
By contrast, less-happy people are more apt to be defensive, isolated, and
self-absorbed, and unfortunately, their negative moods are catching (technical
name: emotional contagion). Just as eating your dinner doesn’t help starving
children in India, being blue yourself doesn’t help unhappy people become
happier.”
Gretchen’s book The Happiness
Project is packed full of impressive research why striving for happiness
benefits everyone, and she backs it up with her personal experience. When she
is feeling happy, she finds it easier to notice other people’s problems. She
has more energy to take action, to tackle the sad or difficult issues. She is
less consumed with herself. In working on her happiness project she came to an
intellectual breakthrough that she calls her Second Splendid Truth: “One of the
best ways to make yourself happy is to make other people happy. One of the best
ways to make other people happy is to be happy yourself.”
I get that. And I have tons of
respect for Gretchen.
But I think there’s a definite
difference between what positive psychologists and happiness experts like
Gretchen are saying, and the philosophy sold to us in Gilbert’s book, and
evidenced in a new generation of noncommittal happiness searchers.
It comes down to meaning.
Holocaust survivor and late
psychiatrist Viktor Frankl explains it best in his classic, Man’s Search for
Meaning:
“To the European, it is a
characteristic of the American culture that, again and again, one is commanded
and ordered to ‘be happy.’ But happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue. One
must have a reason to ‘be happy.’ Once the reason is found, however, one
becomes happy automatically. As we see, a human being is not one in pursuit of
happiness but rather in search of a reason to become happy, last but not least,
through actualizing the potential meaning inherent and dormant in a given
situation.
This need for a reason is
similar to another specifically human phenomenon — laughter. If you want anyone
to laugh you have to provide him with a reason, e.g., you have to tell him a
joke. In no way is it possible to evoke real laughter by urging him, or having
him urge himself, to laugh. Doing so would be the same as urging people posed
in front of a camera to say ‘cheese,’ only to find that in the finished
photographs their faces are frozen in artificial smiles.”
Frankl’s laughing analogy is
perfect.
In Gretchen’s experiment,
happiness is a byproduct of the commitments she has made — to herself, to her
family, and to her community. Her happiness is a direct result of very hard
work, not a life of Saturdays.
I’m not even going to use the
term happiness for me — again, because, when I do, the primal part of my brain
fires up and I start twitching. But peace or resilience, as Kramer says, that
is available to me as a result of investing myself into the world, by tackling
all of my Mondays as best I know how, and by honoring my commitments day in and
day out.
Oliver Sacks on Learning He Has Terminal Cancer
| Op-Ed Contributor |NYT Now
My Own Life
By OLIVER SACKSFEB. 19, 2015
A MONTH ago, I felt that I was
in good health, even robust health. At 81, I still swim a mile a day. But my
luck has run out — a few weeks ago I learned that I have multiple metastases in
the liver. Nine years ago it was discovered that I had a rare tumor of the eye,
an ocular melanoma. Although the radiation and lasering to remove the tumor
ultimately left me blind in that eye, only in very rare cases do such tumors
metastasize. I am among the unlucky 2 percent.
I feel grateful that I have
been granted nine years of good health and productivity since the original
diagnosis, but now I am face to face with dying. The cancer occupies a third of
my liver, and though its advance may be slowed, this particular sort of cancer
cannot be halted.
It is up to me now to choose
how to live out the months that remain to me. I have to live in the richest,
deepest, most productive way I can. In this I am encouraged by the words of one
of my favorite philosophers, David Hume, who, upon learning that he was
mortally ill at age 65, wrote a short autobiography in a single day in April of
1776. He titled it “My Own Life.”
“I now reckon upon a speedy
dissolution,” he wrote. “I have suffered very little pain from my disorder; and
what is more strange, have, notwithstanding the great decline of my person,
never suffered a moment’s abatement of my spirits. I possess the same ardour as
ever in study, and the same gaiety in company.”
I have been lucky enough to
live past 80, and the 15 years allotted to me beyond Hume’s three score and
five have been equally rich in work and love. In that time, I have published
five books and completed an autobiography (rather longer than Hume’s few pages)
to be published this spring; I have several other books nearly finished.
Hume continued, “I am ... a man
of mild dispositions, of command of temper, of an open, social, and cheerful
humour, capable of attachment, but little susceptible of enmity, and of great
moderation in all my passions.”
Here I depart from Hume. While
I have enjoyed loving relationships and friendships and have no real enmities,
I cannot say (nor would anyone who knows me say) that I am a man of mild
dispositions. On the contrary, I am a man of vehement disposition, with violent
enthusiasms, and extreme immoderation in all my passions.
And yet, one line from Hume’s
essay strikes me as especially true: “It is difficult,” he wrote, “to be more
detached from life than I am at present.”
Over the last few days, I have
been able to see my life as from a great altitude, as a sort of landscape, and
with a deepening sense of the connection of all its parts. This does not mean I
am finished with life.
On the contrary, I feel
intensely alive, and I want and hope in the time that remains to deepen my
friendships, to say farewell to those I love, to write more, to travel if I
have the strength, to achieve new levels of understanding and insight.
The image that came to my mind
from reading this is how a log put on a fire often flares up before the fire
burns more steadily from within...
Dr. Sacks, as a long-time
reader of your life's works, this admission by you of your own mortality and
the grace with which you wish to...
person, but have pondered much
about what the appeal of religion carries for others...life after death seems
to be one...
This will involve audacity,
clarity and plain speaking; trying to straighten my accounts with the world.
But there will be time, too, for some fun (and even some silliness, as well).
I feel a sudden clear focus and
perspective. There is no time for anything inessential. I must focus on myself,
my work and my friends. I shall no longer look at “NewsHour” every night. I
shall no longer pay any attention to politics or arguments about global
warming.
This is not indifference but
detachment — I still care deeply about the Middle East, about global warming,
about growing inequality, but these are no longer my business; they belong to
the future. I rejoice when I meet gifted young people — even the one who
biopsied and diagnosed my metastases. I feel the future is in good hands.
I have been increasingly
conscious, for the last 10 years or so, of deaths among my contemporaries. My
generation is on the way out, and each death I have felt as an abruption, a
tearing away of part of myself. There will be no one like us when we are gone,
but then there is no one like anyone else, ever. When people die, they cannot
be replaced. They leave holes that cannot be filled, for it is the fate — the
genetic and neural fate — of every human being to be a unique individual, to
find his own path, to live his own life, to die his own death.
I cannot pretend I am without
fear. But my predominant feeling is one of gratitude. I have loved and been
loved; I have been given much and I have given something in return; I have read
and traveled and thought and written. I have had an intercourse with the world,
the special intercourse of writers and readers.
Above all, I have been a
sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself
has been an enormous privilege and adventure.
Oliver Sacks, a professor of
neurology at the New York University School of Medicine, is the author of many
books, including “Awakenings” and “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.”