Mary Oliver: Give in to joy

 Cousin Mary's sage advice:

Zero-sum

 

The peripatetic highway to happiness

"The traditional name for Aristotle’s school of thought is Peripatetic philosophy. The word “Peripatetic” comes from the verb peripateo, which in Greek, both ancient and modern, means “I go for a walk.” Like his teacher Plato, and Plato’s teacher Socrates before him, Aristotle liked to walk as he reflected; so have many important philosophers since, including Nietzsche, who insisted that “only ideas gained through walking have any worth at all.” But the ancient Greeks would have been puzzled by the romantic figure of the lone wandering sage first celebrated in Rousseau’s Reveries of the Solitary Walker (1778). They preferred to perambulate in company, harnessing the forward drive their energetic strides generated to the cause of intellectual progress, synchronizing their dialog to the rhythm of their paces. To judge from the magnitude of his contribution to human thinking, and the number of seminal books he produced, Aristotle must have tramped thousands of miles with his students across craggy Greek landscapes during his sixty-two years on the planet. There was an intimate connection in ancient Greek thought between intellectual inquiry and the idea of the journey. This association stretches far back in time beyond Aristotle to the opening of Homer’s Odyssey, where Odysseus’ wanderings allow him to visit the lands of many different peoples “and learn about their minds.” By the classical period, it was metaphorically possible to take a concept or idea “for a walk”: in a comedy first produced in Athens about twenty years before Aristotle was born, the tragedian Euripides is advised against “walking” a tendentious claim he can never substantiate. And a medical text attributed to the physician Hippocrates equates the act of thinking with taking your mind out for a walk in order to exercise it: “for human beings, thought is a walk for the soul.” Aristotle used this metaphor when he began his own pioneering inquiry into the nature of human consciousness in On the Soul. He says there that we need to look at the opinions of earlier thinkers if we hope “to move forward as we try find the necessary direct pathways through impasses”: the stem word here for a “pathway through” is a poros, which can mean a bridge, ford, route through ravines, or passageway through narrow straits, deserts and woods. He opens his inquiry into nature in his Physics with a similar invitation to us to take not just to the path but to the highway with him: the road (hodos) of investigation needs to set out from things which are familiar and progress toward things which are harder for us to understand. The standard term for a philosophical problem was an aporia, “an impassable place.” But the name “Peripatetic” stuck to Aristotle’s philosophy for two reasons. First, his entire intellectual system is grounded in an enthusiasm for the granular, tactile detail of the physical world around us. Aristotle was an empirical natural scientist as well as a philosopher of mind, and his writing constantly celebrates the materiality of the universe we can perceive through our senses and know is real. His biological works suggest a picture of a man pausing every few minutes as he walked, to pick up a seashell, point out a plant, or call a pause in dialectic to listen to the nightingales. Second, Aristotle, far from despising the human body as Plato had done, regarded humans as wonderfully gifted animals, whose consciousness was inseparable from their organic being, whose hands were miracles of mechanical engineering, and for whom instinctual physical pleasure was a true guide to living a life of virtue and happiness. As we read Aristotle, we are aware that he is using his own adept hand to inscribe on papyrus the thoughts that have emerged from his active brain, part of his well-exercised, well-loved body. But there is just one more association of the term “Peripatetic.” The Greek text of the Gospel of Matthew tells us that when the Pharisees asked Jesus of Nazareth why his disciples didn’t live according to the strict Jewish rules of ritual washing, the verb they used for “live” was peripateo. The Greek word for walking could actually mean, metaphorically, “conducting your life according to a particular set of ethical principles.” Rather than taking a religious route, Aristotle’s walking disciples chose to set out with him on the philosophical highway to happiness."

"Aristotle's Way: How Ancient Wisdom Can Change Your Life" by Edith Hall: https://a.co/8YfVaNZ

"Aristotle's Way: How Ancient Wisdom Can Change Your Life"

"The words “happy” and “happiness” work hard. You can buy a Happy Meal, or drink a cheap cocktail during happy hour. You can pop “happy pills” to improve your mood or post a “happy” emoji on social media. We value happiness highly. Singer Pharrell Williams’ song “Happy” was number one and the bestselling song of 2014 in the United States, as well as in twenty-three other countries. Happiness, according to Williams, was a transitory moment of elation, or feeling like a hot-air balloon. Yet we are confused about happiness. Almost everyone believes that they want to be happy, which usually means a lasting psychological state of contentment (despite what Williams sings). If you tell your children that you “just want them to be happy,” you mean permanently. Paradoxically, in our everyday conversations, happiness far more often refers to the trivial and temporary glee of a meal, cocktail, e-mail message. Or, as Lucy in the Peanuts comic strip put it after hugging Snoopy, an encounter with “a warm puppy.” A “happy birthday” is a few hours of enjoyment to celebrate the anniversary of your birth. What if happiness were a lifelong state of being? Philosophers are divided into two main camps about what that would actually mean. On one side, happiness is objective, and can be appreciated, even evaluated, by an onlooker or historian. It means having, for example, good health, longevity, a loving family, freedom from financial problems or anxiety. According to this definition, Queen Victoria, who lived to over eighty, gave birth to nine children who survived into adulthood and was admired around the world, had a clearly “happy” life. But Marie Antoinette was clearly “unhappy”: two of her four children died in infancy, she was reviled by her people and executed while still in her thirties. Most books about happiness refer to this objective “well-being” definition, as do the studies set up by governments to measure the happiness of their citizens on an international scale. Since 2013, on 20 March every year the United Nations has celebrated the International Day of Happiness, which seeks to promote measurable happiness by ending poverty, reducing inequality and protecting the planet. But on the other side are philosophers who reject this, and instead understand happiness subjectively. To them, happiness is not akin to “well-being” but to “contentment” or “felicity.” According to this view, no onlooker can know if someone is happy or not, and it is possible that the most outwardly boisterous person might be suffering from deep melancholy. This subjective happiness can be described, but not measured. We cannot assess whether Marie Antoinette or Queen Victoria was happier for a greater proportion of her time alive. Perhaps Marie Antoinette enjoyed long hours of intense gratification, and Victoria never did, having been widowed early and having lived for years in seclusion. Aristotle was the first philosopher to inquire into this second kind of subjective happiness. He developed a sophisticated, humane program for becoming a happy person, and it remains valid to this day. Aristotle provides everything you need to avoid the realization of the dying protagonist of Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886), that he has wasted much of his life scaling the social ladder, and putting self-interest above compassion and community values, all the while married to a woman he dislikes. Facing his imminent death, he hates his closest family members, who won’t even talk to him about it. Aristotelian ethics encompass everything modern thinkers associate with subjective happiness: self-realization, finding “a meaning,” and the “flow” of creative involvement with life, or “positive emotion"...

Aristotle's Way: How Ancient Wisdom Can Change Your Life" by Edith Hall: https://a.co/inx7Ndk

Quote from Two Wheels Good: The History and Mystery of the Bicycle by Jody Rosen

"I was crazy about bikes, but I was no expert. I knew gearhead kids who hung around bike shops and wielded Allen wrenches like switchblades—who were always revamping their bikes, making them badder and radder. I wasn't like that. To this day, I can barely patch an inner tube. I wasn't a masher who went on long rides and hammered up hills. I wasn't a BMX kid who popped wheelies and shredded half-pipes. I rode to get my mind right. It was as if there was a vent in my skull, and as I pedaled and built up speed, the wind would whip through, clearing out the muck. It's not that biking around made me sharper-witted or smarter. On the contrary, I was, like many males my age, confused about nearly everything important yet certain I had the world figured out, or could at least bluff my way through by affecting a certain swagger. I'm sure that bike riding made me more confident in these misapprehensions, a more self-possessed dolt. It definitely calmed me down and bucked me up. I could get on my bike in a fog of neurosis and dismount a while later feeling all right—brave enough, at least, to pick up a phone and call a girl. I've always paid attention to the way bicycles look, so it's odd that I can call to mind only hazy images of the bikes I owned as a child and young adult. I know that the bicycle I rode that day on Claremont Avenue was a banana-seat wheelie bike of some sort, a fitting first ride for a '70s kid. The bicycles of my younger years rather neatly align with period trends. Sometime in the early '80s, I got a ten-speed with dropped handlebars; in the late '80s, I got a mountain bike. Along the way, there were other bikes, of varied makes and looks. Bikes came; bikes went. I must have had six or seven between the ages of five and twenty-five. I outgrew certain bicycles and wore out others—or, rather, mistreated them, locking them up overnight on the street all year long, even in the winter. I love bikes, but I'm not precious about them. I've never owned an expensive bicycle. I don't doubt that a splendid high-end machine would ride like a rocket ship, but I've never felt the impulse to splurge on one. As a kid, I admired my neighbor's fancy Cannondale road bike, which looked like it had been assembled from bits of sky and cloud: gleaming cobalt frame, white handlebars, white saddle. But I also envied the piratical battered BMX Mongooses that kids zipped around on, with ratty tennis balls wedged between the spokes. Then as now, I was no connoisseur. I was, I am, something more along the lines of a bicycle glutton. If the pedals turn, I'll ride it."

— Two Wheels Good: The History and Mystery of the Bicycle by Jody Rosen
https://a.co/7sS3TgA

Phil.Oliver@mtsu.edu

👣Solvitur ambulando

💭Sapere aude

"a responsibility to create the conditions for happiness"

"The subject of Gross National Happiness comes up often in Bhutan. GNH is both an emblem and a conundrum—a point of pride but also a subject of disquisition, debate, and confusion. Many in Bhutan find it hard to articulate exactly what GNH is. Many contend that the concept is misunderstood. Some observers of Bhutanese politics suggest that GNH is not so much profound as it is nebulous—less a philosophy than a brand or a slogan, vague enough to appeal to all comers, notably tourists with excitable Orientalist imaginations and ample spending money. Kinley Dorji is one of the people most often asked to explain GNH. For years he worked as a journalist—he is the former editor-in-chief of Kuensel, Bhutan’s national newspaper—and there is still a hint of ink-stained wretch in his gruff manner. But by the time I met with him, he had moved on to a different job, as the head of Bhutan’s Ministry of Information and Communications, working out of a pleasant office in a Thimphu compound that houses many government ministries. “Here is the key point on GNH,” he said. “Happiness itself is an individual pursuit. Gross National Happiness then becomes a responsibility of the state, to create an environment where citizens can pursue happiness. It’s not a promise of happiness—it’s not a guarantee of happiness by the government. But there is a responsibility to create the conditions for happiness.” Dorji said: “When we say ‘happiness,’ we have to be very clear that it’s not fun, pleasure, thrills, excitement, all the temporary fleeting senses. It is permanent contentment. That lies within the self. Because the bigger house, the faster car, the nicer clothes—they don’t give you that contentment. GNH means good governance. GNH means preservation of traditional culture. And it means sustainable socioeconomic development. Remember that GNH is a pun on GDP, gross domestic product. We are making a distinction.”"

Two Wheels Good: The History and Mystery of the Bicycle" by Jody Rosen: https://a.co/hpYaSDR

Happy pedaling

"In 2006, the king shocked his subjects by unilaterally ending Bhutan’s absolute monarchy. He led an effort to draft a constitution and institute democracy. In 2008, the country held its first general election. Outside Bhutan, the fourth king is best known for his contribution to what might be called political philosophy. It was he, the story goes, who formulated the concept of Gross National Happiness, Bhutan’s “guiding directive for development,” an ethos of holistic civic contentment based on principles of good governance, environmental conservation, and the preservation of traditional culture. Gross National Happiness, or GNH, has made Bhutan a fashionable name to drop in international development circles and a tourist destination for well-heeled, usually Western, New Age seekers. Somewhere along the way, the king took up cycling. It is rumored that he learned to ride when he attended boarding school in Darjeeling, about seventy-five miles from Bhutan’s western border. His education continued in England, at the Heatherdown School, in Berkshire, whose stately campus was crisscrossed by pupils on bikes, commuting between dormitories, classrooms, and cricket greens. Eventually, the Bhutanese royal family imported a bicycle to Bhutan. According to one story, it was a Raleigh racing bike, manufactured in Hong Kong, which arrived in parts and was assembled “upside down” by servants. The defect was spotted by Fritz Mauer, a Swiss friend of the royal family, who personally rebuilt the bike. The now-functional bicycle became a favorite possession of the young crown prince, who often took cycling trips in the dense forests abutting various royal family residences. He became famous—infamous, in the circles of nervous courtiers—for riding “along mud trails at perilous speed.” The royal family’s bicycle was possibly the first bike in Bhutan, and Bhutan may well have been the last place on earth the bicycle reached. Prior to 1962, the country had no paved roads. Today, Bhutan remains, by the usual standards, inhospitable to cycling. It is, almost certainly, the world’s most mountainous nation. The average elevation in Bhutan is 10,760 feet. According to one study, 98.8 percent of the country is covered by mountains. Its roads twist through daunting climbs and hairy descents. Its rugged off-road trails, mottled with rocks and caked in mud, pose a challenge to the sturdiest bicycle tires and suspension systems. Yet today there are thousands of bicycles in Bhutan, and the number is growing. In Thimphu, a city of about one hundred thousand with no traffic lights, bikes scramble up the hilly streets, navigating the one major intersection, where smartly dressed police officers direct traffic from an ornate gazebo that stands in the center of a roundabout. Meanwhile, government officials are increasingly voicing the aim “to make Bhutan a bicycling culture.” The idea is not altogether surprising, given Bhutan’s commitment to environmentalism and sustainability. Still, the idea of a “bicycling culture” taking root in the Himalayas is by definition eccentric. It is no coincidence that the societies that have most successfully integrated cycling into civic life are in northern Europe, where the countries are, as the saying goes, low. The cycling fad in Bhutan is also noteworthy because the story begins with a king and his bike. We know this is not unprecedented: if we riffle the pages of history, we find various places in which bicycles first reached sovereigns and the sovereign-adjacent. But in the twenty-first century, at least, cycling fever does not typically spread from palaces to the people. “There is a reason we in Bhutan like to cycle,” says Tshering Tobgay, who served as Bhutan’s prime minister for five years, from 2013 to 2018. “His Majesty the fourth king has been a cyclist, and after his abdication, he cycles a lot more. People love to see him cycle. And because he cycles, everybody in Bhutan wants to cycle, too.”"

Start reading this book for free: https://a.co/5Bj1AuQ

A sign of HOME

"Where the Hellenistic philosophies excelled was the production of what could be called secular religions. They were based on self-help–oriented doctrines often borrowed from the earlier philosophers but interpreted and presented in a way that made more direct sense to a lot of people. I’m calling them graceful-life philosophies to distinguish them from other philosophy. Their goals were practical happiness, and they were not merely theoretical about it: they provided community, mediations, and events. In this they were more like religions, but they did not identify themselves as religions and they had remarkably little use for God or gods. The Hellenistic graceful-life philosophies had a lot in common. The experience of doubt in a heterogeneous, cosmopolitan world is a bit like being lost in a forest, unendingly beckoned by a thousand possible routes. At every juncture, with every step, one is confronted with alternative paths, so that the second-guessing becomes more infuriating even than the fact of being lost. After a direction is chosen, one is constantly met with another tree in one’s path. What do you do if you come from a culture that had a powerful sense of home and local value, and now you are lost in something vast and sprawling, meaningless and strange? The stronger your belief in that half-remembered home, the more likely you are to panic, to grow claustrophobic among the trees and beneath their skyless canopy. Hellenistic men and women felt a desperate desire to get out of the seemingly endless, friendless woods. The graceful-life philosophies of this period were able to achieve an amazing rescue mission for the human being lost in the woods and bone-tired of searching for home. They did this by noticing that we could stop being lost if we were to just stop trying to get out of the forest. Instead, we could pick some blueberries, sit beneath a tree, and start describing how the sun-dappled forest floor shimmers in the breeze. The initial horror of being lost utterly disappears when you come to believe fully that there is no town out there, beyond the forest, to which you are headed. If there is no release, no going home, then this must be home, this shimmering instant replete with blueberries. Hang a sign that says HOME on a tree and you’re done; just try to have a good time. Thus the cosmopolitan doubter looks back on earlier generations with bemused sympathy—they were mistaken—and looks upon believing contemporaries with real pity, as creatures scurrying through the forest, idiotically searching for a way out of the human condition. After all, it isn’t so bad if you just settle in and accept a few difficult ideas from the get-go."

Doubt: A History: The Great Doubters and Their Legacy of Innovation from Socrates and Jesus to Thomas Jefferson and Emily Dickinson": https://a.co/atAGlEk

 Harvard studied people for 79 years to find the biggest thing that makes us happy

Breanna Robinson

Harvard studied people for 79 years to find the biggest thing that makes us happy | indy100

Harvard University researchers studied people for 79 years - and they discovered the most significant thing that makes us feel happiest.

The researchers found that close relationships make men happy in life through copious amounts of data obtained from medical records, questionnaires, and in-person interviews.

They also understood that social ties acted as a shield for people from life challenges while improving physical and mental wellness.

This comes as quite a surprise for a society in which work is prioritised and recognised as the golden ticket to a better life.

In a unique kind of ongoing research, the Harvard Study of Adult Development tracked the lives of 724 men for 79 years.

With that, the men were divided into two classes. One group was sophomores at Harvard College, and the second group was a group of boys from Boston's impoverished neighbourhoods.

From the moment they were in their adolescence up to old age, they were investigated to determine what keeps men healthy and jovial.

Since 1938 (and year after year), the researchers asked the men questions about their lives, health, and work without knowing how their truths would play out.

It turns out that being prosperous in life is a function of being close with friends, family and community. It didn't have anything to do with things such as IQ, genes, social class and fame.

Robert Waldinger - a psychiatrist at Massachusetts General Hospital, professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and fourth director of the study - said that our relationships have a powerful impact on health.

He made this observation in a popular TED Talk and said that the study uncovered these same lessons about relationships.

While noting that loneliness is toxic, Waldinger also said that social connections made people happier, physically healthier, and live longer lives.

On the other hand, Waldinger also said that people who happen to be more isolated than they mean to "are less happy" face "health declines earlier in midlife" and "their brain functioning declines sooner."

"And they live shorter lives than people who are not lonely."

Waldinger further noted that the quality of close relationships is critically important to take notice of. He also said that they could see which of the men would grow into happy, robust octogenarians by looking back at them in midlife.

"When we gathered together everything we knew about them at age 50, it wasn't their middle-age cholesterol levels that predicted how they were going to grow old; it was how satisfied they were in their relationships," he said.