. . . AND MY HEART SOARS

“Joy is the serious business of heaven, just as play is the serious business of childhood”. ~ C.S. Lewis

________________

In his 1988 speech as incoming president of the American Psychological Association (APA), Martin Seligman made a riveting statement (which I now paraphrase): “On the scale of happiness, we psychologists have given ourselves the job of helping people move from - 5 to 0 . . . and we’re content with that. But what about 0 to +5? How do we get beyond mental illness, how do we help people find ways to increase their happiness?”. And so began the exploration of a new frontier which has come to be known as Positive Psychology. Seligman, who had already become famous for his study of depression (“learned helplessness”) eventually wrote books entitled Learned Optimism (1998) and Authentic Happiness (2002), reflecting his new orientation.


In the second of these books, Seligman documents an exercise which has been empirically proven to increase one’s global level of happiness.  This exercise, much like a gym workout, must be practiced at least several times a week in order to bring about lasting change.  Would you like to know what it is?  Would you like to be happier?


Well then, just send $29.99 to the following address. . . lol, just kidding!  Here it is; but I warn you, this exercise may seem too simple to really make a difference.  (Maybe you’d take it more seriously if you did have to pay for it?) Ready? OK, here goes:


Tonight, before you go to bed, think back on the day you have just completed . . . and identify your three favourite moments.  


Umm, basically, that’s about it. If you like, you can write down your good moments—which could be anything from eating a really great cinnamon bun to receiving a sincere compliment to hearing a bird sing while you were waiting for a bus—in a “Gratitude Journal” . . . but the main point is to simply identify and acknowledge them. This exercise, sometimes called “Three Blessings”, will quite likely increase your overall level of happiness. How? By causing you to focus on what is right about your day, to look for positive exceptions (if you are going through a difficult time), to cultivate gratitude and appreciation for your life, to enable you to fall asleep with the expectation of good things for the day ahead.  When I read the research on this exercise several years ago, I decided to put it into practice with my young sons.  We began to do it together every night at bedtime. I knew it was beginning to ‘take’ when my son Zac, who was about four at the time, told me one day when we were doing something fun, “Daddy, this is going to be my favourite thing.”


So, what gives you joy?


I love looking for flashes of joy in the midst of my days.  Often these come through the little moments that I might easily pass by in the often-frantic business of living: the laughter of one of my sons . . . a good breakfast shared with a friend . . . gliding my canoe through the mist of a mirror-still wilderness lake early in the morning (ahhh!) . . . an autumn run through dried leaves on Mount Royal . . . unexpectedly hearing “Here Comes The Sun” played in the métro by an itinerant guitarist . . . and I would invite you to make your own list. If you like, leave a comment with one of your three good moments. 


I close this reflection with a poem I love by Chief Dan George, "My Heart Soars”:

The beauty of the trees,
the softness of the air,
the fragrance of the grass,
speaks to me. 

The summit of the mountain,
the thunder of the sky,
the rhythm of the sea,
speaks to me. 

The faintness of the stars,
the freshness of the morning,
the dewdrop on the flower,
speaks to me. 

The strength of fire,
the taste of salmon,
the trail of the sun,
and the life that never goes away,
They speak to me. 

And my heart soars. 

“SLOW DOWN, MON!"

Life goes fast. Some twenty years ago, a friend and I who were working in Toronto decided we wanted a change of pace. It was February, we were stressed out, and we badly needed some sun. We asked a travel agent to make us her best offer, and a few days later, found ourselves sitting in a Holiday Inn dining room in Montego Bay. It seemed surreal that only hours earlier we had been plodding though a Canadian winter, and now we were in paradise. It soon became clear, however, that it would take a while for us to acclimatize ourselves to the Jamaican tempo. My friend dropped a fork and beckoned impatiently to a waiter, “Excuse me, could I have a new fork?” The waiter’s bemused answer, accompanied by a calming gesture, became our mantra for the rest of our stay: “Slow down, mon!” As we gradually did manage to slow down, we came to appreciate a very different pace of life; when I would ask when the next bus was scheduled to arrive, the answer would invariably be, “Soon come!” No hurry, no worry. It turned out that a less sped-up approach to life, more focus on relaxation than on efficiency, was exactly what the doctor ordered. My then-girlfriend who came to pick us up in the Toronto airport a week later found two happy and decidedly unwound guys wearing tropical shirts and giggling like schoolgirls, and she wondered if we had perhaps partaken a bit excessively of Jamaica’s famous herbal offerings.

Life has not shifted out of the fast lane since. In the first decade of the 21st century, the almost-unlimited leisure predicted back in the 1960’s somehow never did materialize. If life seemed fast before . . . now it is even faster.  We are connected 24/7, and we find ourselves struggling to keep on top of our email, not to mention our Facebook. Our iPhones and BlackBerrys make it possible to react almost immediately to client requests as well as family crises, and the old paradigm of Work/Personal Life Balance seems almost quaint as we negotiate the brave new world of Work/Personal Life Blend.

And the Internet, an amazing and magical tool, increasingly inhabits our thinking and provides us with the means of even greater efficiency, not just in our work but also in in our relationships. In 2000, only 46% of Americans were online; now the figure is 80%. In 2004, people began to speak of the Web 2.0, or “Social Media”: this medium was no longer simply an efficient method of finding information; it became a way of life, a way of making our relationships more efficient. It is astounding how our lives have changed, bit by bit, under the influence of such social media as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube. Now there are 200 million blogs we can follow . . . 2 billion YouTube viewers, watching 30 billion videos each month. . . as of last July, 20 billion Tweets . . . and 550 million Facebook members, now citizens of the third largest ‘country’ in the world. And everything is just getting faster and faster.

In 2010, Nicolas Carr published The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to our Brains, an expansion of his thought-provoking 2008 essay “Is Google Making Us Stupid?" . Carr’s premise is that the Internet may actually be changing how we think—that our neural networks are being pruned towards quicker but shallower thinking, like sampling from a smorgasbord rather than sitting down to enjoy a gourmet meal. This new way of thinking may be diminishing our capacity for higher-order cognitive processes: abstract thinking and metaphor, mindfulness, reflection, inductive problem-solving, critical thinking, imagination . . . and my particular concern, our capacity for empathy (part of which is predicated on imaginatively being able to put ourselves in another’s position, and caring about that other feels).

We are beginning to react against the superhuman speed of life, in several domains; in a society of fast food, a new trend becoming popular is that of “slow food": taking a whole day to plan, prepare, and savour a meal with friends who are not in a hurry. Courses on “Mindfulness”, a basic model of Buddhist meditation, are being presented to leaders of industry. And in a world of ever more frenzied multitasking, I recently read on Mashable about a radical new approach to time management: “Single-Tasking", doing just one thing at a time!

But in this sped-up, plugged-in world, just how do we stay human? In fact, how can we become even more human, more humane, in our inner lives and in our dealings with each other? I would like to offer a few suggestions which I believe might help:

• Slow down! Find activities —like eating, walking, running, or talking—that you don’t have to rush through, activities you can savour like fine wine.

• Read a book. Fine, read on your Kindle or your iPad if you must, but read a book from beginning to end, don’t just leapfrog from hyperlink to hyperlink.

• Exercise your imagination. “Imagination is more important than knowledge” was not spoken by a lazy thinker but by Albert Einstein. And imagination still differentiates us from the computer. Make up stories with your kids, pretend, daydream.

• Practice inductive thought. Be mindful, meditate, pay attention as you go through your day. Before going to sleep each night, ask yourself, “What was my favourite moment today?”

• Get into nature. My absolute favourite way of slowing down is wilderness canoeing. It has a way of reconnecting me to what is essential.

• Unplug—from the Internet, from your cellphone, from your laptop, from technology, even from your wristwatch sometime (if you still hang on to that 20th-century artifact!) When my family leaves on a canoe trip into Algonquin Park, we ceremoniously stow our watches in the glove compartment and begin a “timeless” week. It’s a refreshing way to go through a day “time-free”. (And if you miss a movie, there’s always Netflix, lol!)

• Reconnect with loved ones in real, face-to-face time, and cultivate the decidedly slow art of listening.

• Keep a journal: “Reading makes a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man”. (Francis Bacon)

• Play a sport or practice a physical activity like gardening or knitting or yoga or illuminating manuscripts.

I personally love the art of therapy: my office is a place where I can turn off my cellphone, disconnect from technology, tune in to the human story, and connect with another person at a deep and personal level. It’s a rich way to spend my days, and I think it is helping me become more and more human.

Do you have other activities, strategies or tricks that work for you, that help you slow down and help you preserve your humanity? I’d love to hear them. I’d also like any ideas about what kinds of articles might be interesting for me to write. (I’d like to journal more this year—and don’t worry, I’ll make future articles shorter!)

A Place Where Everyone Knows Your Name

I recently had the privilege and pleasure of running my second Boston Marathon. (Not that I'm bragging. . . koff! koff!). The crowds in Boston are the best thing about this storied marathon, in my opinion; on Patriot's Day everyone has the day off, and whole families make it an annual tradition to line the course and cheer on the runners, while also enjoying a well-lubricated family barbecue and watching the Red Sox game on TV. Grandparents, young kids, teenagers, and of course, the Wellesley College girls (renowned for their enthusiasm!)—they all line the course, yelling out encouragement and hoping for a high five or a hand-slap (or for a kiss, in the case of the aforementioned Wellesley spectators) from a passing runner.

I noticed while running the marathon last year that the crowd loved calling out what was written on runners' shirts, whether a name, a place or a slogan, so I decided this year that I would enable them to give me more personalized encouragement. The night before the race (April 19, 2010), after having indulged myself in my traditional agonizing over what to wear ("Does this black sleeveless singlet make me look fat?"), I took a roll of yellow masking tape and began carefully spelling out my name on the front of the chosen shirt. I decided that "Darrell" would be almost illegible from the sidelines (and would take more tape than I had), so I settled on "DARE" in capital letters: a sometime nickname which could also serve as a word of encouragment to my fellow-runners. So the morning dawned, two F-15 jets flew over the starting line, the gun released us, and I plunged into the 26.2-mile race as DARE. . .

The first half of the race was amazing, even beyond what I had anticipated! Groups of half-drunk college boys chanted, "DARE! DARE! DARE!". . . little children called out my name. . . I felt like a celebrity, like a conquering hero, with lots of shouts from both sides of the road of "Go, Dare!" and "I DARE you to finish this race!" Even once, a big black woman who was serving as a volunteer and handing out cups of Gatorade at around the 10-mile mark, yelled out, "I DARE you to love me!", which did wonders for my flagging legs as well as for my ego. And I won't even mention the girls of the Tunnel of Screams in front of Wellesley College! (As the Nike banner warned us before reaching the college, which is the half-way mark, "Brace Your Ears!”) 


But my fame and glory was not to last: as my sweat began to pour, the taped letters on my shirt began to lose their stickiness. After hearing "GO DARF!" a few times from the spectators, I realized that my "E" had lost part of itself. And eventually, as all the letters began to sag, I had to scoop them off my shirt and continue the race, nameless. And what a sad difference it made: all at once, I was anonymous. No one called out my name. I felt abandoned by my public, marginalized, almost invisible amidst the throng of runners. All around me people were being noticed, encouraged, even cajoled by name not to quit as we struggled up "Heartbreak Hill": but I was forgotten. The last few miles were difficult; I had to walk at a few points, and the pain increased. I really could have used that personalized encouragement, but I had instead to rely on the voices inside my own head.


What I have come to better understand since running the Boston Marathon is this: I really need encouragement! Encouragement enables me to keep going. And that encouragement needs to be personal, given by those who care about me—who know me, or at the very least, who know my name. I imagine we all need someplace to go where everyone knows our name, as the theme song for "Cheers!" puts it (a show about the community life of a Boston pub). When the going gets tough, when we feel like giving up, a voice of cheer can make a huge difference. It can literally en-courage us, give us courage within. It can keep us from quitting.


Yes, the Boston crowd was amazing that day. Commentators estimated that upwards of 500,000 people lined the marathon course, providing us with hope, humour and even physical support all along the 26.2 miles of our journey. I clearly remember in the haze of the last few miles one woman who reached out her arms to all of us and shouted, with extreme earnestness, "You're all my heroes!”


She may not have known it, but she was ours as well.