Another Word It Never Occurred to Me to Look Up

Happy:  Content; satisfied; enjoying good of any kind, such as comfort, peace, or tranquility.

Happiness is not something I have to go out and seize.  I make a lot of mistakes when I try to acquire happiness.  I find myself trying to seize more stuff, more money, power, and sex.  I feel better when I take satisfaction with what's available right now instead of trying to hitch my happiness to something in the future.  I'm always looking forward instead of being content with what I have right now.  The future, to point out the obvious, might never get here.

Remember: it's always the darkest right before it goes totally black.

Serendipity

Another entry in the "you cannot make this shit up" department . . . 

This is a very big department in my world.

On Monday the meeting format is to read a paragraph out of the book as a topic generator.  The guy today read this:  "We realized that the people who wronged us were perhaps spiritually sick.  Though we did not like their symptoms and the way these disturbed us, they, like ourselves, were sick too.  We asked God to help us show them the same tolerance, pity, and patience that we would cheerfully grant a sick friend.  We avoid retaliation and argument.  We wouldn't treat sick people that way."

As luck would have it I was moved to speak.  Sitting right behind me was a man whose nickname begins with "Poor."  As in: "Hi, I'm Poor Seaweed."  I know - it's not a great nickname.  At one time it was kind of tongue-in-cheek funny but in my five years here I've never heard this guy do anything but bitch about the circumstances of his life.  I mean we're supposed to get better, right?  My patience - wafer-thin on my most tolerant day - had been steadily eroding with Poor Dude.  He also spends about half the meeting fucking around with his cell phone, egregious enough in my book but then he usually shares.  I'm not going to listen to you but I expect you to listen to me.  A hanging offense.

One of my schticks when I talk in meetings is to mention that I care a lot more about myself than I do about anyone else.  I hope that most people know I'm mostly joking in this regard but also trying to make sure that I stay personally honest about my oblivious self-absorption.  Everybody thinks about themselves a lot - I just want to make sure that I don't go overboard with it.  

As I finished this sentence Poor Dude yells out: "No shit!"

This would have been funny in a small circle of friends chatting after the meeting but in a large group it was quite disruptive.  I wasn't offended by the comment - I was offended by the delivery, the timing.  It caused a reaction - people laughed, a couple of conversations started up, there was a general hubbub.  My train of thought was obliterated and this is hard to do to me.  I'm pretty quick on my feet and can weather a lot of chaos but as I had a bit of a resentment against Poor Dude anyway and as he broke a few of my cardinal rules of meeting protocol I was enraged.  I'm not kidding - I was pissed.

I turned around, right in the middle of a meeting with 50 attendees, and said: "Are you sharing now?"  I waited a couple of beats and added: "Go ahead - the floor's all yours - do you have anything else you want to say?" and then I just looked at him for what seemed like a long time.  I'm not sure if the background noise I could hear was uncomfortable tittering or a continuation of the general disruption but I was too furious to parse it out.

I tried to continue my share but I had to bite it off.  I was simply too angry at that point to talk about the passage trying to help me learn the importance of not getting angry at someone else.

Poor Dude - who I consider a friend and who is genuinely a nice man - apologized to me after the meeting.  I thanked him, told him I'd get over it, then flatly stated that I was angry.  I could tell he felt bad.  His behavior reminded me that there is a lot more to this Program than not drinking and going to some meetings.  There's a lot of work to do or I'm going to get stuck in the mud - I'm going to be repeating the same behavior over and over.  Upward and onward.  No treading water.  No dog paddling.

I talked to a few friends after the meeting and also called my sponsor about this incident.  I wanted to know if I seemed unreasonably angry.  Newer people said I didn't seem that bad, that it's hard to get your train of thought broken like that.  One guy with some time said something along the lines of "Poor Dude needs to keep his fucking mouth shut."  My wife's sponsor said that he acted like a real jerk.

I'll tell you this: once I was angry I was not in charge any more.  I could feel things spinning out of control.

The grouch and the brainstorm were not for us.

Getting Pretty Deep In Here

Grateful:  Appreciate; thankful.  (Ed. Note: Are you kidding me?  I was expecting a grotesquely involved definition, not these two simple words.  Sigh.  Another attempt to complicate a simple concept foiled!)

Thankful:  Showing appreciation or gratitude.  (Ed. Note: D'oh!  I'm trapped in a semantic loop of circular definition logic!  I'm stuck!  I can't escape!)

I am learning a lot from this book on the very old.  Man, these people have a lot of wisdom to share.  I'm enjoying the fact that the author began this exercise with many of the same preconceived notions that I have about aging; namely, that it's all about loss, when in reality it's all about acceptance and gratitude.  Man, I hate those concepts.  The hair on the back of my neck is standing at attention just thinking about gratitude.

An extensive study was done where a group of people was asked to record their thoughts about gratitude while another group wrote down the stuff that annoyed them.  The results?  The group that kept a Gratitude List (ever heard of one of those, Program People?) began to report a greater sense of optimism and well-being, and the effects actually began to show up in their blood pressure and heart rate and sleep patterns.  Wait, it gets worse . . . er, better.  Worse if you're not doing one of these things every day.  The longer the gratitude people persisted at this exercise the the more pronounced the results.

One important caveat must be pointed out:  "It was not enough to be conscious of one's advantages; one had to be grateful for them.  Advantages alone - even awareness of them - weren't enough, perhaps because they can be lost.  Gratitude, on the other hand, was an affirmation that the world gave you things, and might continue to do so."

Contrast this to my normal mind set: that the world is out to screw me.  I'm going to lose what I already have, not be given additional blessings or the ability to transcend the difficulties that will inevitably come my way.

In a later post I'll parse out the subtle differences between a positive attitude on one hand, and the always-getting-screwed attitude on the other.

Another interesting study took MRI brain scans as people experienced nice and good things.  Some subjects were given a free, extremely delicious piece of pie - it was observed that the pleasure reward centers in their brains lit up like a Christmas Tree.  The study then gave other people a smaller, somewhat crappier piece of pie but a piece of pie delivered by a loved one.  There was still activity in the pleasure part of the brain - noticeably smaller - but now it was seen that areas that record social satisfaction also became engaged.  The person who ate the crappy pie actually enjoyed it more.

So caveat emptor: if you're always looking for more bigger pieces of pie good luck with all that.

But let's not go overboard and be idiots about gratitude and happiness, either.  We're all the sum of our own personal genetics and the experiences we lived through when we were growing up.

"Researchers believe that each of us has a general “set point” or average level of happiness that we hover around through our lives’ ups and downs.  If something good happens - say, we win the lottery - we’re joyful for a while, but eventually we return more or less to where we were before. Ditto with setbacks.  This set point, which seems based on some combination of genes and environment, explains why some people can be happy in dire circumstances, and others miserable in enviable ones.  But there is some evidence that we are not slaves to our set point - that we can nudge it upward by regular acts of gratitude or altruism, and by not brooding on our troubles."

Brood:  To dwell upon moodily and at length.

One Day At A Time

The longer I'm at this thing, this life, the more I have come to believe that it all boils down to One Day At A Time.  I seek and search and stumble across the reminder that now is all I have. It's everywhere - philosophy, religion, self-help, meditation.  Get yourself into the moment.

You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment.   Fools stand on their island of opportunities and look toward another land.  There is no other land; there is no other life but this.  Henry David Thoreau

I like that the old old people in the book I'm reading right now have all gravitated towards this idea: today is what I have.  No sense messing around in yesterday and even less messing around in tomorrow, a day which may never come.  Don't focus on what you can't do or don't have but on the things that you can control, the things right in front of you.  And don't heap these things with expectations.

Forget yesterday, prepare for tomorrow, live for today, take a nap this afternoon

I Feel Happy!

Happy:  Enjoying good of any kind, such as comfort, peace, or tranquility; content; satisfied; having no objection.

I look up words and I often end up doubled over in laughter.  If you had asked me to provide a definition of "happiness" I would have come up with a lot of extreme adjectives which I guess is befitting of a man who loves to be on the knife edge of things.  I wouldn't have used words like comfort or peace or satisfaction.  Happiness is getting what you want - a lot of what you want - not being satisfied with what you have.

I've been reading a steady selection of non-fiction books that seem applicable to some of the difficulties that have existed in my own mind, if not in actual reality.  I'm not even sure that calling them "difficulties" is the right approach - a more appropriate phrase would be "shit that's going on that isn't to my liking."  I've read books about depression, dealing with anxiety, gaining some perspective on the aging process, processing the grief caused by the death of loved ones, but wait! There's more!  Order now and receive a set of ginseng gutting knives!!

SuperK is often skeptical when I start to dig deeply into something that I'm struggling with, believing that I'm looking for outside, professional validation of whatever bullshit I'm currently trafficking.  The book I'm reading now is called "Happiness is a Choice You Make."

The following are a few thoughts from the old old individuals who make up the heart of the book.

I don’t understand happiness only as someone just always smiling and laughing.  It’s more like inner happiness, where you feel you have done everything right in your life, you haven’t made anybody unhappy.  You have a certain kind of peace and balance in yourself, and you are not anxious about what will happen the next minute or the next day.  You let it go and you don’t worry, and you lead a balanced life.  If you want the next moment where everything will be better, then you’d better do this moment right.  People often asked him if he was happy, he said, and his response was always the same: of course he was.

But he chose not to dwell on his problems or spend time with people who did.  He mostly avoided people his own age . . . because they tended to talk about their physical ailments or those of others.  His ailments took enough out of him; why should he give them more of himself willingly?  Happiness didn't require effort on his part, and came as a kind of peace.  All he had to do was sit back and let it wash over him.  Life gave him what he needed if he was wise enough to accept it.

Fred hadn’t always felt this way. When he was younger, he said, he thought happiness was something he had to go out and seize.  It led to a lot of mistakes in his life, mostly out of restlessness with what he had.  He described instead a view from old age—taking satisfaction in what was available right now, not hitching it to the future.  My definition looked forward; Fred’s found fulfillment in the present, because the future might not come.

Then this insight gleaned from all of the interviewees . . . 

Their strategies often boiled down to the same thing: spend your dwindling time and energy on the things you can still do that give you satisfaction, not on lamenting those you once did but now can't.  Gerontologists call this "selective optimization with compensation:" older people make the most of what they have left and compensate for what they have lost.

Experience helps older people moderate their expectations and makes them more resilient when things don't go as hoped.  When they do have negative experiences they don't dwell on them as much as younger people do.  Researchers call this "the positivity effect."

Sir Laurence Seaweed-ier

I'm amused at the actor/director references in the literature.  Maybe our founders were frustrated thespians.

Try this on for size:

Each person is like an actor who wants to run the whole show; is forever trying to arrange the lights, the ballet, the scenery and the rest of the players in his own way.  If arrangements wold only stay put, if only people would do as he wished, the show would be great.  Everybody, including himself, would be pleased.  Life would be wonderful.  In trying to make these arrangements our actor may sometimes be quite virtuous.  He may be kind, considerate, patient, generous; even modest and self-sacrificing.  On the other hand, he may be mean, egotistical, selfish and dishonest.  But, as with most humans, he is more likely to have varied traits.  

What usually happens?  The show doesn't come off very well.

Let's call this one the Control Freak.  This individual has trouble realizing that it's hard trying to control the world.  It is a very frustrating exercise.  People do not like to be told what to do.  I HATE being told what to do - why do I think that others would be different in this regard?

And a bit later on . . . but not as far down the road as you'd think.

More than most people, the alcoholic leads a double life.  He is very much the actor.  To the outer world he presents his stage character.  This is the one he likes his fellows to see.

And this fine fellow is the Bullshit Artist.  The BA has to work very hard to survive.  It's incredibly difficult constructing all kinds of alternate realities and then trying to remember what you've done and what you've said - allegedly - in these little worlds.

Remember: if you tell the truth then you don't have to remember what you've said.

An update, as I continue my reading . . . 

"It was as if were actors on a stage, suddenly realizing that we did not know a single line of our parts."

One of most recurring dreams - and this from a guy who almost never remembers any dreams whatsoever - finds me in school.  I'm late for class, sometimes weeks late, I don't have the books, I don't even know where the classroom is, and I'm trying to figure out how I can get out of this pickle.

Driven by a Beating

In one of those wonderful twists of fate a guy asked me to give him a hand working through The Steps at the same time I was working through The Steps to deal with some of my own stuff.   I'm an insufferable ass who loves to tell people what to do irregardless of whether or not I have any facts backing up my instructions so you can imagine how much more insufferable I become when I'm actually currently reading the literature that is helping me justify the stuff I'm making up.

I've had to moderate my technique here a bit in jolly, happy, social Vacation City where "working The Steps" with someone means getting together - in person - and reading through The Steps.  This has required a weird transformation for me, being a child of the sullen, private, solitary Old City environment, where the attitude was more along the lines of "There are two books; the instructions are very clear; do some reading and then get writing and don't call me unless you get stuck."

I have found in my careful reading of our two books that there is a lot of repetition.  Apparently the founders weren't too confident that we were going to pay attention to what we were reading or in our ability to retain any knowledge of what we had just read.

Here's an example of a trend, one where it is being suggested that we don't give ourselves too much credit for finally staggering into our first meeting  . . .

"So it is by circumstance rather than by any virtue that we have been driven to The Fellowship . . . "

Driven:  To have moved (something) by hitting it with great force.

A bit later . . . 

"Faced with alcoholic destruction, we soon become as open-minded on spiritual matters as we had tried to be on other questions.  In this respect alcohol was a great persuader.  It finally beat us into a state of reasonableness."

Beat: To strike or pound repeatedly; to inflict repeated blows; to knock  vigorously or loudly.

So we're beaten and driven into The Rooms by alcohol.  Sounds familiar.  I don't remember being too happy as I walked into my first meeting.

"To to doomed to an alcoholic death or to live on a spiritual basis are not always easy alternatives to face."

You have GOT to love alcoholic thinking.  The elder statesman says to the newcomer: "Here are your choices: you can keep drinking, trying to blot out the miserable facts of your hopeless situation, until you go insane, are locked up, or die alone, on the streets, in abject misery.  Or you can accept spiritual help."

The newcomer thinks for a minute: "Can I get back to you tomorrow on that?"