Advice for Happiness

Alan Watts gave this advice on writing: “Write like you’re clinging to the edge of a cliff, white knuckles, on your last breath, and you’ve got just one last thing to say, like you’re a bird flying over us and you can see everything, and please, for God’s sake, tell us something that will save us from ourselves.”  I’ve struggled for many years now to think of what I might write that was actually worth saying.  My wife recommended I write some advice or life lessons for my children, and recently I was inspired to do just that. 

If I were hanging off the edge of that cliff, drawing a breath to shout back advice or lessons learned to the rest of the world, I’d have to say this: be happy with yourself!  There is no greater happiness in life.  Life is a journey.  And if there is any meaning or purpose to this journey, it comes in two parts. The first part is to find yourself and figure out who you are.  And in case that wasn’t hard enough, the second part is harder still: to be happy with what you find. 

Most of us are taught at some point in our childhood to dislike ourselves.  We’re taught that we’re not good enough, not smart enough, not pretty enough.  It’s hard to ignore the judgment of our peers or to throw off the need to be accepted and to belong.  It may even be impossible.  But eventually you have to be your own judge and decide if your life has met your own standards.  No one else will ever be able to give you this validation and comfort. Be careful of straying from your own inward compass to follow the ideals of another person or group.  Don’t let others judge you.  Don’t let their praise or their disdain be your measure of worth.  When I was younger I took comfort knowing that my name, Daniel, meant “God is my judge.”  But don’t let God judge you either.  Religion may in fact be the most dangerous trap that so many people fall into, a trap that asks you to sacrifice who you are and what you desire for beliefs that may or not be true. 

Nietzsche said that we must “philosophize with a hammer,” test your beliefs by trying to smash them to pieces and tear them apart.  Whatever beliefs withstand this test are the ones worth keeping.  Let the others be dashed to pieces.  Religion was the first great pillar of belief that tumbled in my teenage years.  I was raised Christian.  I even went to a Christian High School where we studied the Bible daily.  But it became clear to me during these studies that if I had been born in the Middle East I would likely be a faithful Muslim.  If I was born in Israel, then I’d likely be Jewish.  If India, maybe Hindu. I came to resent the idea that a loving God would bless those who believed in him and punish those who did not – asking us to make the single most important decision in our whole lives without giving us a shred of proof to help us decide which religion is actually correct.  I became an Agnostic, and decided that if I were ever going to make this decision I would need more evidence to base it upon.  Lacking that evidence, I leave the question of whether there is a higher power alone.  And I certainly don’t decide to make this unknown subject the basis of my decision-making process for how I will live my life. 

The idea of the Christian (or Muslim, or Jewish) god is actually quite laughable when you really think about it.  Why would God make human beings with desires and urges and then judge them by a collection of rules set in opposition to those most basic desires?  Don’t let religion make you feel bad for being yourself. It’s normal to covet your neighbor’s ass, your neighbor’s wife, and especially your neighbor’s wife’s ass.  If you have any decency you probably won’t act upon those urges, but don’t believe those who tell you it is a sin even to even think a certain thought.  It’s normal to desire sex, to desire food, to want to be lazy.  These thoughts and these desires are a part of you.  They arise for a reason.  Listen to them.  Understand where they come from, and then decide which thoughts you truly want to act upon. This is the sign of an intelligent being. And I promise you: life will be more enjoyable if you don’t fight against your basic instincts and desires.  Eat the cookies, and eat the ice cream.  Drink some wine.  Have sex.  Monogamous, polyamorous, bisexual, transsexual, gay, straight, whatever it is… don’t think of any of these desires as evil.  If you have these desires, embrace them, experience them, decide which ones you want to act on, and use those decisions and actions to define yourself.  But don’t you dare let others do that for you.  You need to live your life, discover yourself, and find out who you truly are.  Don’t ever let anyone else do that for you. 

Also beware of anyone who tries to force their ideas onto others.    Liberty and freedom mean that we each have the ability to define ourselves and live our own lives the way we want to.  Some of the most abominable laws have been those that interfere with the ability for others to experience freedom.  Slavery, abortion laws, prohibition: all of these were attempts to force others to live a certain way and give up certain choices.  And all of these have impaired the quality of life of millions of people.  Not all enemies of liberty are as easy to spot as Hitler or the white slave traders.  And remember that even the Germans and most of the slave-trading world accepted – even welcomed! - these despicables in contemporary times.  The bad guys, the enemies of freedom, don’t always wear easily identifiable uniforms.  They look just like everyone else, except that they have this nasty belief that everyone should live by whatever morals, religion, or beliefs that they hold dear.  Incidentally, it’s also common that even they can’t live by their own beliefs, those which they try to force on others.  How many times have we seen people speak out against homosexuality only to catch them in a homosexual scandal themselves?  Be suspicious of anyone who tries to force their beliefs upon others, and stand your ground – at least internally – if they ever try to force them upon you. 

All of these things are necessary if you want to find yourself in life and learn to accept and to love yourself.  I could wish nothing more for anyone than that they experience a life of freedom and have the opportunity to experiment and find themselves, and that they find happiness and contentment with who they are.  There really is nothing else that matters more than this.  And if you can’t find happiness and be content with who you are personally, you will never find that happiness in someone else. 

In a college psychology class, I was once asked to write a paper describing what I wanted to be and what I wanted to accomplish in life.  The teacher said we could write about anything, as long as we were honest with ourselves.  He gave an example of a former student whose goal in life was to have sex with more women than any other person on the planet.  He wasn’t going to judge that life goal, but he did warn him that it would take a lot of time and a lot of focus and probably not leave much time for anything else.  In my paper I said that I wanted to walk down enough different paths in life that I felt confident when I died that I had truly lived and experienced at least some good amount of what life has to offer.  I didn’t need to be super successful in any particular endeavor.  It would be enough just to try different things and enjoy the experience.  In this vain, I decided to rent a cello when I was about 25.  I had always wanted to learn how to play one.  I bought some books, watched some videos, and learned how to play at least a few songs (I was pretty good at “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star”).  I realized I would never be a great cello player, but I enjoyed that immensely and returned the instrument after a few months.  My to-do list right now (at age 38) includes learning how to sword fight by taking fencing lessons.  I’ve always wanted to… and that’s reason enough. 

Find the things you want to try in life and go do them.  Don’t let anyone tell you “no”.  But also don’t expect to be able to jump into everything without study or practice.  There is a Middle Eastern proverb that says we all begin lives as a camel, and our job is to carry heavy loads by studying, learning, and following instruction.  At some point the camel will turn into a lion, and the weight of the loads that the camel carried will determine how strong that lion is.  The heavier the weights, the more intensive the studying and training, the stronger that lion will be.  The lion has one goal: to slay the dragon.  The dragon is a ferocious beast covered in scales of armor, and on each scale is written the words “thou shall not…”.  These are the life experiences that will define who you are.  And if you do manage to slay the dragon (which very few are successful in doing), the lion transforms into a small human, a child, innocent and free to be whatever they want.  Personally, I don’t think I’m ever going to slay that dragon.  I have too much baggage and too much concern for what is “normal” and what other people think.  But I have come to enjoy the fight.  And I will grow stronger and more complete as a person every time I pierce one of the dragon’s scales and learn a little bit more about myself. 

Now that I’m getting older, I’m starting to realize there are a lot of things I might not get to do in this life.  The mid-life crisis is starting to set in and make me want to do things like ride motorcycles out to Area 51 or spend a week at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas seeing just how much trouble I can get into.  I might have to let these fantasies go and exchange them for the relative quiet of family life.  But I do so willfully and knowledgeably.  I decide that one thing is worth more to me than another.  I make that choice.  And I stick by it.  Another important lesson is not to live with regret.  If there is anything in your life that you value and love, you cannot wonder what would have been… Even the smallest choice, if you were to go back in time and change it, could have profound consequences on your life.  You might lose everything that you love.  I learned this from Star Trek (season 6, episode 15, “Tapestry”), but it is an important lesson.  I love my family, and I love myself, and I would not go back in time to change a single decision if it meant putting all of that at risk. 

There have been moments of my life that have been less-than-ideal.  I have struggled with depression most of my life.  (I eventually learned that medication – specifically Lexapro, which we call “the family drug” - is a beautiful thing and that you shouldn’t be ashamed to admit you need it.)  My first marriage ended in divorce, even though as a child of divorce I promised myself my whole life I would never do that myself.  And I have spent many nights crying myself to sleep over various things – mainly women.  But the sadness is necessary.  It builds character.  You shouldn’t trust anyone who has never had to deal with sadness and tragedy.  They have never really been tested as a person.  Similarly, be careful trusting people who are always popular and pretty.  Life has been too easy for them.  True character and quality of character is built in times of struggle and despair.  “Man looks into the abyss, and there’s nothing staring back at him. At that moment, man finds his character, and that is what keeps him out of the abyss.” 

Be careful thinking too much.  It can lead you deep into sadness or other scary places – especially if one is, as one of my therapists once said, “genetically pre-disposed to seriousness and sadness.”  When I was recently out of high school, I was almost crushed by a single thought: life has no meaning.  I became a whole-hearted believer in the philosophy of pre-determination, that everything in life is pre-determined and that the universe carries on like clock-work, following the laws of physics so that cause and effect naturally occur together and could not possibly occur any other way.  What is there to bring hope or happiness to someone who feels that they have no free will or ability to make decisions other than those that were already made for them by whatever power set the universe in motion? 

Strangely, it was this very thought which nearly killed me (literally, I still have the scars), which also set me free.  The Buddhists believe in “dependent arising”, the idea that effect follows cause and that everything springs up as a result of this unending chain of causation that moves the universe forward.  However, instead of a dreadful thing, they view it as a positive.  It means we are all connected – not only to each other, but to all of space and all of time, to every soul that has ever or will ever live, and even to the sand and the ocean and the wind.  Buddhist philosophers like Thich Nhat Hanh argue that it is impossible for anything to die because nothing is ever born.  It is impossible to experience loss or sadness because nothing is ever lost.  Everything is just one substance, changing shapes.  Physicists have the “conservation” laws that say the same thing: conservation of matter, of energy, of momentum.  When viewed this way, the same pre-determination that felt so heavy and soul-crushing became the unifying principal that connected me to all life, and all times, even to the stars.  Decades after this revelation I am still dumbfounded by the strange turn that this thought took in my head, flipping from one side to the other and finding myself freed by the very chains that had ensnared me.  I had previously thought the saying “it depends on your perspective” was silly and that everything should be provably true or false.  I learned that life is indeed a matter of perspective.  The same idea that can kill you, can also set you free. 

I had 3 revelations that occurred to me at this time, almost like visions.  I remember them because I drew pictures of them and later even hung them up in my office at work.  The 3 visions were these: 

1. The infiniteness of space.  I illustrated this by taking a picture of the Milky Way Galaxy and its billions of stars, with a little arrow pointing to one of the spiral arms that houses our solar system labeled “you are here.”  Below this I put an image from the Hubble telescope showing the millions of galaxies that are out there besides our own.  The size of the universe is absolutely incomprehensible. And given this truth, you have the ability to believe either a) that we are tiny and insignificant, or b) that we are infinitely rare and precious.  I prefer to go with option “b”.
   
   
2. The expanse of time.  I illustrated this with a pyramid from ancient Egypt, believed to be thousands of years old (if not older).  Along with this was a poem from an Egyptian written during the New Kingdom: “I have heard the words of Imhotep, and Hordjedef too, retold time and again in their narration.  But where are they now?  Their castles are gone.  Their walls torn down.  Like things that have never been.”  How crazy is it that the Egyptians of the Old Kingdom (like Imhotep) were as ancient to the New Kingdom Egyptians as the New Kingdom Egyptians are to us?  Once again, you can think about how small and insignificant we all are.  Or you can think about the chain of life that connects us all.  Just imagine 1,000 years ago when your great-great-great-…-grandfather and grandmother met.  Their eyes met for a moment.  They fell in love. And if that spark hadn’t happened…  if he had decided not to talk to her that day…  you wouldn’t be here.  Every moment that has ever been has brought us to this moment.  And every choice that we make impacts all the moments that will come after this one.  Imagine a thousand years from now your great-great-great-…grandchildren who will never know about the flirting and dating occurring right now, in our time, without which they would never be.
   
   
3. And lastly… and most obscurely… the Buddhist belief that everything we see in the world is a lie, or at best a half-truth.  Because we can only take in the world through our five senses and we can only process these signals with respect to our current understanding and perspective of the world.  We will never see the world as it truly is.  The visible spectrum of light is only a small portion of what can be seen with instruments, but we are limited to taking in the world this way.  Similarly, we try to fit the world into words and ideas that make sense to us, but those words and ideas will always fall short of capturing the “real” thing as it truly is.  All of the universe as we perceive it is a reflection of the true universe, altered by the very act of perception.  But it’s also all we have.  This was illustrated by a Buddha sitting in a sphere with the word “Maya” below it, the Buddhist term for the world of illusion.     

Perhaps my favorite Buddhist quote is this one: “Thus shall you think of the whole world: a star at dawn, a bubble in a stream, a flickering light, a phantom, a dream.”  This is the world we live in.  One with no clear answers to our most important questions.  And we are forced to find our way through this world, make sense of it, find ourselves in it, and find happiness.  It seems like an impossible task, but it is vitally important.  In fact, even if you don’t consciously try to do it, you are doing it already.  This aligns with the Buddhist conception that the person who searches for true perfection often finds that the people who think the least, who just are, and enjoy being themselves, are in fact the most perfect. 

There is another philosophy which might be a helpful guide in life: the philosophical school of “absurdism”.  The absurdists believe that it is impossible to find the meaning of life or to answer the important questions like “is there a god?” and “how should I live?”.  They believe that despite this uncertainty and lack of answers we have to still find a way to be happy and content.  The absurdist ideals are encompassed by the metaphor of Sisyphus: the Greek king who was punished by Zeus.  His punishment was that he had to continually roll a large boulder up a hill, only to have it fall down the other side as soon as he reached the peak, forcing him to start over again.  This was his life, for eternity.  Struggle and hardship, without hope of relief or salvation.  The absurdists say that you will be able to live a happy life if you can imagine Sisyphus smiling. 

So where does that leave us?  Life is a mystery, and many of its greatest questions will never be answered.  Is there a god?  I don’t know.  Is there a spiritual element to our existence?  I don’t know.  I kind of like to think so, but this is only because it makes things more interesting and I enjoy it – there really isn’t any other reason.  Do I feel like I have lived a good life?  Yes.  Am I happy with who I am?  I’d be lying if I said I was always happy with who I am.  I have too many insecurities and am too self-deprecating for that.  But I am mostly happy with myself.  I am happiest when I sip a glass of wine and think about the grapes that went into it, the journey they took from raincloud to earth, from earth to bottle, sitting in that bottle for years, only to end up in my glass, to tickle my tongue and become a part of my body for at least the next few years.  Similarly, I enjoy a long draw from a cigar, when you can taste the earth and imagine the workers in South American who picked, dried, and rolled the tobacco by hand to bring me this small pleasure.  These tiny treasures make me happy and give me a sense of connectedness with the rest of the world.  It’s the same happiness when I draw a breath and just remind myself how connected we are to all of space and time – many of the same themes I’ve mentioned in this note.  When I stopped praying at the dinner table, I took the advice of a Buddhist who suggested doing a brief meditation instead.  Feel yourself connected to the earth, and to all space and all time (as you always should when meditating).  Look at your food and imagine how it will move through you, becoming part of you, and how your body will eventually become part of the earth again.  Feel that connectedness of all life, all substance and all time, and then open your eyes and enjoy your meal.  If you learn to do this, I will be very proud and very happy for you. 

The Buddhists say that you should not believe all of the Buddha’s teachings just because he said them.  Take only what is right for you and what you understand.  If you disagree or don’t understand something, leave it.  I think this is good advice for all things.  I’d suggest you do the same with this note.  Take anything from it that you believe to have value.  Make it part of you.  Leave the rest.  I will be happy even if you take none of this advice, as long as you can look at yourself and your life and smile.  That is all the happiness I could ever want for anyone.  Know yourself.  Love yourself.  Live your life.  Be happy.  And wish the same upon others. These are the most important things I have learned in my life so far and the best advice that I have to offer.