Link: #131 Gratitude
I’ve been thinking a lot more about quality of life, and all the Feel-Goods recently. Science on happiness shows 2 things for certain that factor to our happiness levels:
1) Quality of Community
2) Sense of Purpose
Humans are social. We need people. We need community. Yes, even us introverts.
Science (and anecdotes) suggest that we also need this sense of purpose. We need something to be working towards, a set of goals to reach.
Community and Purpose.
There seems to be another tremendously valuable ingredient for feeling ‘Happy’. Marcus Aurelius and the Stoics may know it by another name “10% of your life is what happens to you and 90% is how you react”.
Gratitude.
There’s a plethora of science to suggest that gratitude has a tremendous effect on how we feel day to day.
Anecdotally, I sometimes find myself so lost in the sauce of Yesterday and Tomorrow and building the future that I sometimes forget the whole point of it is to enjoy the now. Peace is Every Step by Thich Nhat Hanh very much helped with this.
“99% of life is spent on the journey, and what kind of journey would it be if you don’t enjoy it”
Naval Ravikant
And a delightful clip from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.
If we aren’t stopping to smell the roses every now and again… what’s the point?
But damn is it difficult
There’s so many things that go well, that are working, that we’ve got to be grateful for… but that’s not how evolution works. Historically, enjoying how delicious the berries are, hasn’t kept the saber tooth tigers away.
But most of us don’t live on a day to day paycheck for food, safety, and shelter anymore.
And yet, at least for me, it’s still so difficult to focus on the now. It’s difficult to focus on the feel-goods and the joys of life when I’m so focused on the annual goals. And because we spend such a tiny sliver of our lives embracing the wins as is… what other way do we have to enjoy our lives but to enjoy the journey?
This golfer puts it really nicely (don’t watch golf but I guess he’s pretty good)
If we’re living exclusively for that end state, we’re playing a fools game. It doesn’t exist. Cloud 9. Retirement. Graduation. They all fleeting states of existence, to be experienced in such short succession, before the next goal takes over. Perhaps Heaven. But while on Earth, living for the end state is to live for a state that doesn’t exist.
“Life is nothing but a succession of present moments, culminating in death, and that you’ll probably never get to a point where you feel you have things in perfect working order.”
Oliver Burkeman
Finding Joy
In the Pursuit Of
The Future doesn’t actually exist.
And as Arthur Brooks likes to put it “Mother Nature doesn’t care if you’re happy”. She cares about us gathering resources and procreating. If we are waiting for a future moment to begin to enjoy ourselves… we are, in the most literal sense possible, wasting our time. And damnit, easier said than done.
It feels as if we are in some ways fighting our own biology. I’ve wired my brain (or maybe my brain has wired me) to pursue progress, to step forward, to goal-orient. But I sometimes worry that in expending all my effort towards this ‘better tomorrow’, that I am forgoing to chance to enjoy a really good Today.
Turns out, a lot of us wrestle with this. So here’s a handful of people who also spent too much time forgetting to focus on the Now:
“I wish there was a way to know you are in the good old days… before you’ve left them”
Andy Bernard
“There are times where I used to wish I was where I was back when I used to wish I was here”
Drake
‘I was so focused on doing bigger and better that I forgot what was actually important – doing things that I enjoy each and every day’
Dan Bilzerian
Tom Brady’s 1 minute on Gratitude.
“Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”
Ferris Bueller
The quote from The Office hit particularly hard. I recently saw Russ in concert and he spoke of this exact idea – On the come-up, he was so fixated on building the future, so fixated on getting out of the hell hole he was in, that now that he’s where he is – You romanticize the past – all the thoughts, the planning, the suffering… all of it.
Why is the Present so dang hard just to focus on?
Fortunately though, as with most things, humans have been thinking about this for just a couple thousand years. They’ve cooked up some goodies.
Just One Solution
Thich Nhat Hanh’s perspective has been particularly useful for me. He was buddies with MLK Jr and is a monk from Vietnam. He talks about the monk community developing miniature poems or verses, that help remind the user of their own presence… and to sometimes just BE.
They’re called “gathas”. This one has been particularly useful:
“Breathing in, I know that I am at peace. Breathing out, I smile”
Thich Nhat Hanh, Vietnamese monk friend of Martin Luther King Jr
Washing dishes. Stop signs. Alarm bells. Fuel pumps. Standstill traffic. Church bells. After sex. Before work. Doing laundry. A dog barking.
It’s so simple. Just 12 words. And yet I find myself rehearsing them over and over and over. Moments that I don’t want to forget. Moments to drink in all the sensory experience of Life.
Breath in. Breath out.
They remind me to stay present.
They remind me to appreciate.
And they remind me to be grateful.
Over and over again I see it. The more I can fixate on what I’ve already got, instead of what I’m searching for… I find that I’m a hell of a lot better off.
“No such thing as a life that’s better than yours”
J. Cole
References
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