What I’ve Learned So Far

“I asked my mother, what should I teach my kids? She said don’t teach them anything, just give them lots of supplies.”

—Tony Millionaire

(via Austin Kleon)

I’m still “Gone Fishin’,” like the previous post said, but I wanted to make a little note about this:

• The new George Washington dollar, when it’s actually in your hand, looks and feels like a carnival token. I’m just sayin’.

Please resume your normal activities.

Folks: As much as I love posting here daily, something’s got to give over the next couple of weeks, or else Tim will turn into Mr. ‘Splodey-Head. So new posts will be infrequent, if not absent altogether.

May I take this opportunity to recommend that you add the RSS feed for this blog into a feed reader? If you’re not familiar with the process, you can find out more about it here and here.

Oh, and do feel free to amuse yourselves with a free flow of discussion in the comments — consider this an open thread.

“Reasonable people adapt themselves to the world. Unreasonable people attempt to adapt the world to themselves. All progress, therefore, depends on unreasonable people.”

–George Bernard Shaw

(Thanks to Marcia Conner for reminding me of this one.)

Please do me a personal favor: the next time you hear someone use a phrase like “where are you at?” or “where we’re at on this project”, please smack them across the face with my blessing.

People, hear my rant: “Where are you?” is vastly, if not infinitely, superior to “Where’re you at?” in standard spoken English.* It’s shorter, more grammatical, and doesn’t clang on the ear as a hillbillyism.

Is this my personal opinion? Yes. But it’s right, dang it!

(It’s my blog and I can rant if I want to, eh?)

Okay, glad we’ve gotten this settled. Please carry on.

~~

* If you’re using African American patois, more power to you. Among many other locutions, this (family of) dialect(s) has given us “where it’s at”, which I like as a set expression. But most of the time when I hear “where’re you at” used, it’s from people as whitebread as myself. Give it up, folks.

The other night I was talking with a family member about how the different media each create the conditions for artistic masterpieces. The conversation was in the context of “The Wire” — a show I’ve never watched, but which many think is the best drama on television (and one of the best ever).

Well, haiku would seem to be a good genre to fit on Twitter, where each message has to come in at 140 characters or less. But some Twitterers take it as a challenge to write “twooshes” — i.e. messages that are exactly 140 characters.

After I posted a tweet hypothesizing that a twoosh-haiku might be impossible, a friend pointed me to a Wikipedia page listing the longest single-syllable words in English. Then I composed this twoosh-haiku:

Scootched, then scratched, then squelched
scrounged, then scrunched, then squeezed through straits
breathed, stretched, and then squealed.

A masterpiece? Hardly. But it fascinated me to discover how a theme emerged from the materials I was given. There’s really something to this idea of constraints driving creativity.

“The crime which bankrupts men and nations is that of turning aside from one’s main purpose to serve a job here and there.”

–Emerson

(Besides Shakespeare, who’s more quotable than Emerson?)

Continuing my series of comments on John XXIII’s “daily decalogue”:

3. Only for today, I will be happy in the certainty that I was created to be happy, not only in the other world but also in this one.

This puts me in mind of advice I’ve given in the past to people struggling with romantic relationships. The simplest version of this advice is: “It isn’t supposed to be that hard.”

Mind you, even the strongest relationships will have their rough spots, their points of contention, their ups and downs. But really good relationships just aren’t that hard. You’re not supposed to be fighting all the time. You’re supposed to be basically happy — here and now, not just in the notional future when you finally “work things out”.

It’s much the same for many of us in our careers, in our creative lives, in our bodies:

• We’ll be happy once we’re finally making $50,000 a year (or $100,000, or $500,000, or whatever).
• We’ll be happy when we’ve been promoted into management.
• We’ll be happy once we’ve written a book.
• We’ll be happy once we’ve been published in The New Yorker.
• We’ll be happy after we lose 20 pounds.
• We’ll be happy when . . .

You get the idea. It’s always a case of giving ourselves unbridled permission to be happy . . . after certain conditions are met. Sometimes these conditions might be summarized as “when the world starts bending over backwards to meet our wishes.” Because we can be plenty selfish in what we expect the world to do for us.

Better by far to be “selfish” (more like “self-preserving” or “kind to ourselves”) in assuming that we’re supposed to pretty much be happy as our steady state of being.

Of course events will sometimes derail us. Of course we won’t get everything we desire. Of course there will be real tragedies and tragic-seeming setbacks. But we can be happy — joyful-down-underneath — even in the face of these things.

Life is often hard. But it’s not supposed to be that hard. There’s supposed to be room there for happiness and enjoyment, not in the notional future, but in the here-and-now.

Today is a great day to lay claim to some happiness for yourself.

~

Previously in this series:

• John XXIII’s daily decalogue.
• “Without wishing to solve the problems of my life all at once.”
• “I will not claim to improve or to discipline anyone except myself.”

More to come.

(Image by Dr. Hemmert.)

This is the second follow-up on John XXIII’s “daily decalogue”.

Only for today, I will take the greatest care of my appearance: I will dress modestly; I will not raise my voice; I will be courteous in my behaviour; I will not criticize anyone; I will not claim to improve or to discipline anyone except myself.

There’s so much packed into this that we could talk about it all day. But let’s summarize:

Get yourself aligned first.

Pointing out others’ shortcoming might be the easiest thing in the whole world. They do it wrong, you can easily see how they do it wrong, and you point out the shortcoming. It’s so easy because you have the luxury of not living in their skin, with their history and their hangups. How nice it must be to be you!

But of course, it works the other way around, too. Others can plainly see — and easily admit — the things about us that we either can’t see in ourselves, or else can’t bear to admit.

It’s okay: it’s hard to be really honest with yourself. It’s hard to view yourself with beginner’s eyes.

Just because it’s hard, though, doesn’t mean we should eschew the effort. No, the effort will pay us back a thousandfold if we will embrace it with love and humility. Treat yourself with kindness, and it gets a lot easier to treat the rest of the world with kindness. Discipline yourself gently, and you will carry greater stature among others; rather than needing to criticize others, you may even be able to lead them to something better by the force of your own example.

Today my work is to align myself, not to “correct” anyone else.

(Image by p0psicle.)

Please go and read this, especially if you’re not as happy as you’d like to be day in and day out. Prof. Sonja Lyubomirsky has done extensive work to find out what makes people happy; her reseach has revealed that ~40% of our overall happiness is under our own control — that is, it’s not related to the happiness “set points” we’re apparently born with, and it’s not related to our physical or financial situations.

Born Happy?

Lyubomirsky offers a range of things that anyone can do to cultivate their own happiness. It’s well worth a look and a hard think.

(Photo by bjearwicke.)